music Home > Record Reviews

Wolf Eyes’ Human Animal is the kind of record that will get you angry looks if you play it at work, that will make your partner rethink shacking up with you, that will have your parents asking, gently and worriedly, if there’s anything you need to talk about. Rusty, tetanus-ridden, clammy to the touch, and swarming with rats, Human Animal sounds like it was cut in the room that Saw took place in on the killer’s off day. It’s music for people who think the problem with metal and hardcore is that they didn’t go far enough, and noise for people who thought "skate or die" was more than just a catch phrase.

Wolf Eyes’ inhuman production schedule--dozens upon dozens of hastily cut records released in dozens upon dozens of formats every year--makes a bloodied hash of the idea of "legit" releases, but Human Animal is the group’s second on Sub Pop, and so it’ll get reviewed in the glossies (and alt-weeklies) while equally disturbing records on HereSee and Hanson are left to the noise dude underground. Less Grand Guignol than the group’s 2004 Sub Pop debut, Burned Mind, Human Animal is the difference between the cut-rate, gore-soaked slasher flicks and the cut-rate, dread-soaked stalker flicks that used to line video store walls in the early ’80s. Long stretches of ill, chain-dragging-along-a-corridor ambiance is suddenly interrupted by shrieking, retching noise and the Australopithecus rhythms and queasy garbage-heap dub that make Wolf Eyes some of the best bodyrocking music around. "The Driller" was even released on handy 12-inch disco single format, so everyone can get down to the sound of a bone saw taken to a ship’s hull.