This is the sound of a thrash band sent into the bush andforced to beat their way out with twigs. Everything here, from the warbled acoustic pickin’ to the LightningBolted two-note spasm ascensions, is worn with a genuine conviction, theprimacy of frayed roots, dirty levity and the private knowledge that endurance isgod in this new landscape.
The irresistible, metalheaded glee in its delivery may notmatch the stories Wohaw tells, but theexuberance turns the forcefulness others make up in speed or obscurity to agolden gallop across four album sides, a blissful infinity. The band’s politics, never as shouted astheir name and often focused on Native American tragedy as example, are betterphrased here than ever before, blending into the stream-of-consciousness vocalstyle, the theatrical séance calls, and all those screamed punker dreams inbrilliant cadence. Wohaw is primitive-core, not quite timeless because it exists inthe in-between places, but because of it messy and overblown and fragile andbeautiful like it doesn’t even know it.
Music jumps, ongnarled trajectories of perfect, over-stomped drums, guitars naked andeffected, through a chain of finely-filed rune shapes, blasts of thrash andSabbath bliss, elfin guitar heroics, shanty hoe-down raga shit, and theearthiest, smudgiest, non-math nerd rock I’ve witnessed.
USA Is A Monster have done what I’d hoped forthem, brought out a double album, their best record yet, expanding unreservedinto the unclaimed prairie sweep and caustic city spaces of their music,bursting with heroic gratitude and joy like one succeeding, sending one up tothe sky and watching as it’s accepted. Itwould be easy to describe the band in terms of the blatancy with which theyintegrate the urgency and idealism of punk with the progressive arrangements,happy absurdity, and zen resolve of psychedelia. But the genres, at least in these terms, areessentially the same, and neither can translate the truth coming through on Wohaw.
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