Wolf Eyes’ second album on Sub Pop follows on from 2004’s Burned Mind like nothing has happened in between. Human Animal may come in slicker packaging but it is more of the same Gristle-worship. That being said, it’s very good and they manage to pack extra menace into every second of every piece.
Sub Pop
I’ve stopped buying Wolf Eyes’s CD-R releases as they are far too patchy in terms of quality in both sound and performance. Plus there’s too many to keep up with. At least with their Sub Pop albums I know that a certain level of quality will be enforced as so much more money is being pumped into an album like this versus a rough jamming session released as a limited edition of 18 spray-painted CD-Rs. Wolf Eyes simply work better when the recording is good and the full range of sounds can ooze from the speakers. Human Animal confirms this for me. This CD is worth any number of their self-released albums. The title track alone is the sound of every Wolf Eyes performance distilled into one song. The jerky rhythms, vomited up vocals and high pitched squeals make for the nicest uneasy listening I’ve heard in a while.
The titles are as tongue in cheek as ever. “Rationed Rot” is an eight-minute sludgefest; drones curl over each other as a slow, broken beat coughs like a dying machine. The saxophone that appears towards the end sounds great; much more subdued playing than usual which gives a suitably queasy sound. The album showcases one of the things I like most about Wolf Eyes that even when the music is as dull as dishwater (which thankfully is not the case for any of the pieces on this album), they still manage to create a horrific mood. “Rusted Mange” is a disorientating and nauseous piece that feels far longer than the two minutes it actually takes up. The same can be said of the album as a whole; it’s only half an hour long but feels like forever.
The sentiment that closes the album on the song, “Noise Not Music,” couldn’t be further from the truth. Yes, Wolf Eyes make me feel a little sick sometimes but even at their most raucous they are not noise but noise that can be rocked out to. This song (a cover of a band called No Fucker, apparently) in particular makes me want to bounce around the room. To me, Wolf Eyes are what punk should sound like. When I used to look at pictures of fucked up punks as a kid I used to imagine music that was loud and visceral, which many of the bands didn’t deliver but Wolf Eyes mostly do.
Human Animal is one of the better things they’ve done. It is a well rounded album that pushes all the right buttons. While this album has sparked a new interest for me in the band, I’m still not going to bother with any of their more obscure releases as it seems to me that they only really hit the mark in two situations: live and when a record label nudges them in the right direction.
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