Wolf Eyes

The first time I listen to them, I am reminded of the farm, of home.

If you know of the band Wolf Eyes, and their style of “build and release” static tension as a noise band, this contrasts sharply to the bucolic sense of life and ease of the farm. But if you’ve felt the horror-movie rise of slow suspense that is their magic touch build along your shoulders and wrap around your neck, you also know that contrast is a tool regularly employed in their grating, grinding musical productions. And you know that there is nothing easy about this music.

I know next to nothing about this band from Detroit, Michigan when I listen to it for the first time, nothing except what some cute indie-rock kid has told me about them.

“They are really the best of the noise music bands. They’re the easiest to get into. They’re just… so wonderful!” he says, hands waving, either in punctuation or for lack of exact description. Days later, after listening to them myself on MySpace, I can’t exactly describe their breed of perfection either, except to say that it is every rusted metal gate blowing in solitude I’ve ever heard. Every creepy, creaking protest of car-wreck metal death, or ancient, clanging tool bouncing and reverberating off corrugated tin walls comes lurching at me from the past as I listen. Eyes closed, ears feeling through the landscape of sound crafted before me, I “see” the complexities and things no one writes about in contemporary music because they’re too dense to grasp, blended into the background shadows of nuance and imagination.

I listen to three samples on the band’s MySpace page(http://www.myspace.com/therealwolfeyes): "Live at Heath's," "Live in Columbus," and some untitled track. and then I listen to them again, three more times.

The music isn’t exactly off-putting, nor is it really music though, with a harmony or rhythm I can follow. And yet… there is structure, timing, mood—the elements of music exist in their billowy, mushroom cloud breakdown of sound and comfort. The basic motif, although it changes for each song, is that of tension and deliverance.

Normally when I think of the supreme excellency of build, and pain and climax in this genre of sound, I think of Nine Inch Nails and Trent Reznor’s angry, melodic suspense, but the sound and the vision-- and thus the scope one receives in looking through the sound of Wolf Eyes, is not at all that of NIN.

The only fan with a “name” on the band’s top friends list goes by “Steve,” others include “greenmist,” “Demons” and weird records. Friendly hellos from other friends, and cryptic messages like “let the smoke rise!” make the page feel almost… homey? in a way. Like there is truly something for everyone, an appreciation for music and sound and craft in every genre, and these guys deliver it to the complex minds who need to get inside discomfort and deconstruct it, organizing order and shape in the meantime.

Without saying anything (decipherable), this attention to craft and development speaks volumes about the “psychedelic” essence of their sound. Music, and its interpretation takes shape in the mind’s eye and ear differently for everyone, but really, that’s what music is. The crafting of an aural picture cut from the sounds and tones of instrumental variations around us, layered with our own lives.
In Wolf Eyes, I see the family farm, rusted and rickety and left to its own devices, and I feel the death confines of darkened hallways in every 70s slasher flick I’ve ever seen. But because I feel these things and am released from the dark decay of my own inner trappings and crawling skin, in the end, the pain is manageable, in doing what it has set out to do.

The in between

He is half a world away; I'm laying on my living room floor, which is as cluttered and thick with "shit" as his vocabulary at this late hour.
"I mean look at your myspace page. It's like you think you're omnipotent or something."
If I were sitting, if I even had a chair in my apartment to fall off of, I would have. Omnipotent. No, not me. Not anymore. Death, or near-death, takes that away from you, takes away youthful wrecklessness and assumptions of invincibility.
So I tell him.
"Yeah, well, you know after my stroke I didn't know who I was, if I'd ever be ok again, if I still had it. Once I knew that I did, to some degree, I could come to Chicago and make it here. But I had to maybe... put on pretense? Re-invent myself? Fake it, to get it back?"
"Fake it? No, you're not faking it."
"So do I come off like my shit don't stink?"
Laughter.
"No, no, not that either."
"Arrogance."
"No, just... your voice. And as a writer, as long as you get the facts straight, that's the best voice to have."
"Yeah, thanks. Sometimes I feel like I am faking it, like it's still just a show because I don't know if I've got it, if I can make it."
"You can.. You're the most driven friend I have. You've always had it."
Sarcasm. And laughter. But proximity.

Dreaming of...

I've been dreaming of home--Nebraska-- a lot lately. A week ago, I had a dream of careening down a narrow ditch roadway with various members of my extended family in a hurry and making everyone but my dad mad. He trusted me, even when I didn't trust myself and almost lost a passenger out the door (we were in a Green VW) and then put us all in the ditch. He was totally unflapped. Then a couple of nights ago there was a dream about a friend's mom having ovarian cancer. Last night there was the weird one with my former boss. Then this afternoon, as I was waking up from a nap, all of my teeth (on the bottom) were falling out, my dad was asking what was wrong, I was in my kitchen picking up my teeth and taking care of the same friend with a sick mom.

I have no idea what all of this means, but I feel like home is trying to get at me somehow. It's obviously inside of me, even if I don't necessarily appreciate it as home.
One of my friends used to say "you can get the girl outta the farm, but you can't get the farm outta the girl." I used to cringe and remind her to never say that about me or around me and other people. But I guess she's right. Even if only in her dreams and my nightmares.