Dig up descriptions of Michigan trio Wolf Eyes from any time during their 16-year existence, and I doubt you'll see much use of the word “precision.” But their music has always had this quality-- even if it’s sometimes been covered in whirring distortion, brittle cacophony, or psychotic howls. Go back as far as “Half Animal, Half Insane”, from 2002’s Dread, and you can hear them picking and placing their sounds meticulously. Even though the results could feel abrasive or abstract, the attack has never been messy or careless. Most of the time, it’s a precise rendering of Wolf Eyes’ horror-movie visions and hard-edged sonic obsessions.
This knack for precision has reached a new level on No Answer: Lower Floors, Wolf Eyes’ first widely-released album since 2009’s Always Wrong. It’s the clearest, most detailed record in their vast catalogue. There’s little in the way of buried elements or blurred dissonance; in fact, much of the album could be accurately described as minimal. The best example is the longest, a 12-minute dirge called “Confession of the Informer”. Sparse and desolate, it contains only a few sounds at any given moment-- and most of them are distant and fade quickly, like the after-images of a light flash disappearing inside your eyelids.
Why is “Confession of the Informer” more gripping than a standard blast of rising noise? The secret lies in Wolf Eyes’ ability to cook up thick tension with the simplest sonic ingredients. It’s a skill they’ve had for a while, but lately they’ve focused it to a point of perfection. It helps that Nate Young and John Olson-- the group’s only consistent members since 2000-- have worked diligently on this aspect of their music outside of Wolf Eyes, in the sparse sketches of their duo Stare Case, the rangy experiments of Young’s Regression, and the reggae-influenced rhythms of Olson’s Hazel and Henry Slaughter. It also helps that new member Jim Baljo adds a further layer of laser-like clarity in his dexterous guitar playing. (Baljo replaced Mike Connelly last fall, though Connelly and the other former Wolf Eye, Aaron Dilloway, both contributed to No Answer: Lower Floors). All these factors have pushed Wolf Eyes to a peak of efficient power, where a single sound can ripple tension through the rest of a song.
The most powerful of those sounds are Young’s simple yet maniacally exacting beats. It’s fitting that No Answer: Lower Floors begins with one, tearing open the stereo space before other sounds can move in. His beats are the spine of the music, the compass around which all the other noises align. So while droning chords spark the slow-swinging “Chattering Lead”, the beat pushes them and Young’s deadened moans forward. It’s also what gives the song visceral impact, more so than the band’s tactile sheen. That sheen might make you woozy, but it’s Young’s beats that punch you in the gut.
What they don’t do, though, is push the music toward crashing climaxes. Young has recently talked about keeping the Wolf Eyes sound “realistic,” and resisting the temptation to jump from zero to ten at every opportunity. The result of this outlook on No Answer: Lower Floors is momentum that’s primarily implicit. Swells are tenuous and elusive, lurking in shadows without ever jolting into the frame. While Wolf Eyes have often used words and images that suggest the shock of slasher films, it’s this haunting aspect of their music that truly evokes scary movies.
Not that No Answer: Lower Floors is all about negative space. The album’s busy soundscape is much more diverse and rounded than that. In places it offers full-on noise-- take the fire-bomb opening of “Born Liar”, or the siren-like wail of “Warning Sign”, not coincidentally the sole track on the album without vocals. But the fact that Wolf Eyes can do both quiet and loud, fast and slow, or frantic and subdued, is no big deal on its own. What matters is the way they make those polar modes seem united and even indistinguishable. Which is yet another reason why something as subdued as “Confession of the Informer” can feel so vital and active.
This ability to connect opposites explains why, even though they’re often associated with the wave of American Noise that rose last decade, Wolf Eyes have always seemed to occupy their own self-made world. Part of that comes from the way they’re constantly generating releases, both as Wolf Eyes proper and under an endless array of side projects and solo ventures. But it’s also because no one else has swung between extremes so deftly, in a way that makes outer edges meet on a curving continuum rather than sitting on far ends of a spectrum. On No Answer: Lower Floors, this fact, like the music itself, is clearer than ever before.
