Wolf Eyes have always had a B-movie aura. They’re like the Roger Corman of underground music, churning out releases, inspiring other low-budget noise-auteurs, galvanizing scenes both locally in Michigan and globally in festivals and collaborations. Many of their blunt album titles have a schlock-horror feel: Slicer, Dread, Burned Mind, Human Animal. That feel is in the music too. At turns scary, funny, dramatic, and transfixing, Wolf Eyes’ morphing sound has one constant: creepy, thick tension.
The trio’s B-movie game is in full effect on I Am a Problem: Mind in Pieces, whose title sounds like either a pulpy confessional or a campy drug-education filmstrip. Song names feel like lost movies too: "T.O.D.D." as killer-robot sci-fi, "Asbestos Youth" as mean-streets teen flick, "Cynthia Vortex AKA Trip Memory Illness" as LSD-soaked journey into madness. Lyrics reference drowning heads, toxic thoughts, burning hairs, suffocation cages. If this album getting released the day before Halloween is a coincidence, it sure is a lucky one.
Most importantly, the music on I Am a Problem: Mind in Pieces contains all the ominous suspense of a classic horror movie. Each track oozes with eerie tones and seat-edge momentum, such that something terrifying seems to always lurk around the corner. The album even mimics the narrative arc of a thriller: the first few tracks gradually heighten the plot, until action explodes in the damaged-punk climax of "Enemy Ladder" and its tale of "twisted lands of severed hands." The denouement of "Cynthia Vortex" follows, ending with singer Nate Young’s chopped-up groans that evoke a victim’s final gasps of air.
Though he’s an equal partner in sound-crime with bandmates John Olson and James Baljo, Young is the star of I Am a Problem’s cinematic tremors. His jaw-clenched snarls and subliminal seething get under your skin. Razor-like moans in "Twister Nightfall" curl sharply around a monster-march beat and Baljo’s guitar grind, while Olson’s creaky noises on "T.O.D.D." rhyme with Young’s yelps. Even on "Enemy Ladder", where frantic rhythms swirl into a cloud, Young's bark center things like the piercing eye of a pulsing storm.
Beyond his own vocal dexterity, Young’s recent move toward more subdued music in his solo work (often under the name Regression) has steered Wolf Eyes to a place where small shifts can make huge ripples, and hypnosis is as powerful as confrontation. One of the best Regression albums is aptly titled Stay Asleep, and Young has developed a keen knack for sonically replicating nightmares—"I burn my dreams just to stay warm," he sings in "T.O.D.D."—and making gripping music from dark shadows and subtle motion.
In fact, I Am a Problem: Mind in Pieces may be too somnambulant for noise-hounding Wolf Eyes heads, or newcomers impatient for quicker cuts to the chase. You have to sit still a while and let the trio’s sonic images wash over you before their musical zombies rise from the dead to terrorize the stereo space. But give this album a fraction of the patience and attention that Wolf Eyes have put into it—effort on a par with their excellent previous effort, No Answer: Lower Floors—and you’ll be glad you stayed up late enough to see how it ends.
