Wolf Eyes
Burned Mind

A ravenous black bird pecking away at a pair of decaying heads: a cover that perfectly expresses the essence of this music, which will drill into your brain until the death of your cerebral faculties. And "Burned Mind" is hardly an arbitrary title for this album by Wolf Eyes, the new sensation in the American experimental-noise scene of the third millennium.

It's 2004, and landing with a major label like Sub Pop is noticeable. The album is, in fact, the most "accessible" (quotation marks are mandatory!) to date under the Wolf Eyes name, thanks largely to the production, which is more defined and calibrated than before. This does not mean it is easy listening. After all, we're talking about true masters of the extreme. Perhaps not the bearers of the innovative force that a certain section of the critics would like to attribute to them, perhaps in a slightly watered-down version to capture new market segments, given the greater visibility that a label like Sub Pop can offer, but still masters of the extreme.

Contemplating the concept of extreme is always difficult in a world where the boundaries of the extreme are constantly being stretched in all directions, and the judgment of what is truly extreme consequently becomes something purely subjective, depending on one's sensitivity, perspective, and reference paradigm.
In this case, however, the Wolf Eyes seem to want to put everyone in agreement: in "Burned Mind," all the extreme currents traceable in today's musical universe converge, and regardless of the music one prefers or fears most, listening to this album is an experience that certainly cannot leave anyone indifferent.

Just consider the minute and thirty-eight seconds of the opener "Dead in a Boat": harmless rustling, background noises, and then suddenly something inaudible attacks our unprepared ears. A drum machine blazing at ten thousand, a torrent of inexplicable sounds, an agonizing groan in the distance: the shock is such that after the storm has passed, we will still be asking ourselves, dazed, if it was electronic, grindcore, or a train that just hit us.
Only by continuing to listen can we understand that Wolf Eyes make electronics (and what electronics!), but doubts about labeling this music persist. For example, the vocals are clearly hardcore in nature, shouted and angry as tradition demands, yet so distorted and filtered that it borders on the icy croak of pseudo-black metal singing. But not only that: we were talking about electronics, but aren't we actually dealing with the most annihilating harsh noise? The most deafening drone music? The most hallucinogenic industrial? The most disjointed noise? And the rotten guitars? Simple post-hardcore or cybernetic sublimation of the most funereal doom?

As you can see, in the entity of Wolf Eyes, all the negative energies that the musical universe makes available are channeled. And what emerges is something fresh and personal, absolutely not reducible to the individual components, so much so that the aforementioned ingredients do not explicitly emerge but blend and compress into a sonic chaos where violence, desolation, and nihilism ferment. The sizzling of a neuron fry, the bubbling of sludge from the bottom of a black well, a vigorous gargling of slime and rust: "Burned Mind" is a wall of sounds where it's not clear who is playing what. And fortunately, the inner booklet gives us a clue, reminding us that this hell is made by only three: Nate Young, Aaron Dilloway, and John Olson, who skillfully divide themselves among synthesizers, tapes, PCs, guitars, and voices.

"Burned Mind" is also the album of maturity for Wolf Eyes, a little essay on urban neuroses (all condensed in just under half an hour, excluding the last ten minutes of silence) where the full and empty parts are perfectly calibrated, where explosions of uncontrollable rage are balanced and complemented by moments of unsettling calm.

In the first part of the album, the cacophonous soul of the trio certainly prevails, and for our ears, like steaks tossed into a tank of hungry piranhas, death comes at the roar of whistles, the madness of frequencies, killer knob tweaks, lethal basses, and guitar blasts.
In the second part, on the other hand, what reigns are the ambient breath of drones, the sequences of sounds in loops, the throb of basses, the buzz of guitars, the chipping of an unsettling noise. This obviously does not reassure us at all but makes us constantly fear the worst. And in this regard, how can we not mention the eight perfidious minutes of the monumental "Black Vomit" (the title already gives the idea): a slow electronic ritual that from the simple initial beats, through elaborate evolutions, grows and grows until it spills into a tearing chaos of voices overlapping and jostling like a flock of vultures attacking the carcass of our ears.

The music of Wolf Eyes is an orgy of sounds, a suburban ceremonial that seems to come from a cursed basement, a sort of pagan ritual of the industrial era aiming to attract its evils rather than exorcize them. But the true paradox of Wolf Eyes is their ability to recreate an inner chaos, to execute an assault that, despite appearances, is not a physical assault (impossible to mosh, impossible to shout the pieces out loud, impossible to crank up the volume beyond a certain safety level, unless you want to ruin your stereo speakers, and with them your house walls!). Their assault rather assumes, through echoes and electronic rarifactions, a mental dimension, a psychic collapse, a bewildered state residing in the listener's head. It's not an invocation of dark forces, but a process of amplification of ghosts that already exist.

No wonder the black bird on the cover symbolically devours a head while perched on another, as if the destruction of the mind is both the endpoint and the necessary premise. The formal adoption of an approach that draws strength from the analog-digital dichotomy is reflected in the contradiction inherent in the album title ("Burned Mind": the mind, in its inconsistency, cannot burn!), a title that, in turn, reaffirms the contradictory allure of this music, concrete yet abstract, physical yet cerebral, solid and pungent yet elusive. A cry of despair, therefore, that generates neither liberation nor constitutes an emotional release, but instead fuels repression and neurosis in a dire vicious circle.
Wolf Eyes create nothing and destroy nothing, but simply close, with lethal effects, a circuit born from the negative energies, fears, and frustrations of the unfortunate whom they contact. Like a fire that spreads from a handful of sparks.

Unfortunately, most of the time, words don't truly convey what one wants to say; for this reason, before abandoning yourselves to the terrifying sounds of Wolf Eyes, I wish that everything that might sound fascinating or disturbing in any way from these words of mine be disregarded, because there is nothing truly fascinating or disturbing here, unless the stench emitted by a decaying corpse fascinates you. Or, better yet, the toxic exhalations of a burned mind. Yours.