Wolf Eyes - London Underworld - 17/4/07
4/5
By: Thomas Hannan
Wolf Eyes are still the only band I have ever listened to with some part of my anatomy other than my ears. When really mining a sound that's up there with their best, you listen to Wolf Eyes with your feet. You hear them in your stomach. You rattle, as if you yourself are being played as one of their instruments.
And when they're at their best tonight, that's exactly how you feel. Used - gladly - as part of the whole mess that is their sound. Bits of it have people bent double, simply mouthing the word 'amazing' to each other. Eyes squinted. In these moments, Wolf Eyes transcend their own humanity. They become something unfathomable, something you can't sufficiently comment on, something you simply experience. It's an experience that takes time to recover from. An event which sticks with you, making other music, no matter how heavy or how loud, seem puerile.
It's not one long barrage of improvised music either. This is a very well thought out set - and people au fait with their craft will be able to pinpoint moments which one can recognise as genuine Wolf Eyes tunes - things given titles like 'Stabbed in the Face' and 'Black Vomit' (which is played after the band host a vote for which 'track' the throng would like to be subjected to next). This is rewarding in that you get to brace yourself for the moments you anticipate most, though even then they arrive louder, heavier, scarier than your shitty little iPod speakers would ever convey them to you.
There's a problem though. In between songs, Wolf Eyes talk. And when they talk, the myth - whereby we held them as some kind of entity outside the boundaries of space, time, good taste and all that is holy - comes crashing down in to a million pieces. They're very much, boringly, mere people. As they keep informing you, they are "f**kin' WOLF EYES!!!', and they're super excited to be playing for "LONDON, you motherf**kers!!!". It might not sound like it when you close your eyes and picture the world imploding, but Wolf Eyes, to look at, are a fists in the air metal band. Devil horns, the lot. How upsettingly... normal.
We've just got to get over the fact that Aaron Dilloway, responsible it seems for all that was most brilliantly unsettling about the band during his time with them, is not in Wolf Eyes any more. Thanks be though that they are at least a lot better at this fists in the air, crowd 'pleasing' thing than they were six months ago, and that they don't totally eschew the low, rumbling, curiously clicking and totally terrifying bits that made us love them in the first place. The 'Eyes are now a different band, worthy of merit for new reasons - but yet a group of musicians still more than capable of blowing you most conclusively off the feet you're listening to them with.
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