Wolf Eyes- I Am a Problem Mind on Pieces (2015)

Wolf Eyes- I Am a Problem Mind on Pieces (2015)

“I always thought of the zombies as being about revolution, one generation consuming the next.”

George A. Romero

By: Ghost Writer

I’m not sure these days, my tastes are in constant change, but for a long time, Wolf Eyes were one of my favorite bands, a band that broke so many mold, and that aimed to stay truly mind bending and innovative, looking for new ways to not only create music, but terrorizing experiences, although not exactly a prog band, Wolf Eyes have shown an amazing instinct for evolution, as they have managed to mutate into something else with each record, if you check one of their first ones and this, you can´t deny that the band has truly grown as something else, now they don’t just seem happy peeling the paint form the wall with their noise, now they are decided to play with our minds and dig holes in our brains and fill them up with psychedelic waves.

True to their nonconformist nature, this Detroit native band is releasing this year a new chapter in their career, one which continues their dangerous route into loud experimentation, the band known for their monumental sound compositions using large doses of noise, seems here to be unafraid of trying new tricks and getting advantage from the lessons learned by its members during their adventures on separate projects, for Wolf Eyes, experimentation comes in first person always.

Catching the Rich Train is not exactly the white noise blast one would expect coming from the band, but a deep immersion on the resonant sound world the learned from the great dub master Lee Perry, a big part of their particular sound, and if that wasn't enough, check out the nearly tribal percussion on Twister Nightfall, another impressive song with a punkish attitude and distorted electro lines, it might sound too weird considering this is a Wolf Eyes record, but the band displays a truly mature attack on every one of the tracks in the record, and talking about tribal beats and punkish attitude, check out the intro to T.O.D.D., as Wolf Eyes again seems to be moving years ahead of today's musical trends, getting immersed into dirge like compositions less abstract than their previous noise records and displaying a pretty addictive new interest in slow and dense sound collages with an almost  twisted Wagnerian touch and a dash of the long psychedelic laid back jams that made Sun Araw so good in the early days, as veterans Nate Young, John Olson and not so new, but not so veteran Jim Baljo.

Techno and electronica influence shows immediately in Asbestos Youth, here the band retreats a bit to the more disturbing sounds of their earlier records, combined here with really deranged vocals by Young, that after the dub treatment acquires really eerie characteristics, the band creates their own world under their own logic, mind and time altering melodies that become better than a thousand drugs in order to accede to a whole new multi-dimensional sensitivity, the band getting really heavy and psychedelic here, masters of a whole world of sound that separates them completely form the whole legions of noise artist they initially helped to spawn .

The band simply returns to its primitivism in the brutal thrashing of Enemy Ladder, a piece that remind us that this is still a rock band at heart, one capable of shaking things up, and still rolling like a devastating Panzer, exhibiting the band's power to be as monstrous as the mighty Repulsion (a pioneering grindcore band) and just as out there as the tremendous Liars, but the band is wise enough to keep the best for the last bullet aimed at us, as Cynthis Vortex aka Trip Memory Illness becomes an almost epic piece with the band using themselves at full, getting a prodigious equilibrium between the band favorite sound bizarre universes, the robotic cold beats of techno, the vibrant sounds of dub and the demonic dissonant attack of hardcore, the band showing that after all, they weren't noise terrorists but truly sound artists, specialists in terror, just as Dario Argento, George A. Romero or Tobe Hooper, and confirming the fact that the band was not about extreme volume, but about real extreme experimentalism, it wasn’t about turning up the amps, but turning up your worst fears.