“Burned Mind” opens with a long stretch of silence, made longer by the anticipation that at some point things are going to get very, very loud. After thirty seconds of clicking and scratching, this moment occurs, and woe to anyone deceived by the quiet to turn up the volume. The result is a vicious, discordant burst of static and noise-overlaid with indecipherable screamed vocals-which rushes forth like the fetid, stale air that accompanies prying open a tomb.
The common denominator of the album is static. Be it eerie atmosphere or ear-splitting noise, it covers every sound like a thick moss. The fact that there are 13 tracks and only 9 song titles creates confusion over which tracks are the listed songs and which are just interludes, besides the brief length of some, there isn’t any way to differentiate. This is heightened by the lack of clear song divisions, each track melts into the other, with long lulls of quiet in between. Track 5 is the kind of song that needs to be listened to with headphones to get the full effect; as the balances shifts from left to right, revealing bursts of crackling static, you can actually feel the scratching sensation in your ears. Conversely, track six has the sonic ability to make you go deaf if you’re wearing headphones, with a shrill whine that rises steadily to an unbearable pitch. It’s hard to know what to think of a band that tries to physically harm its listeners.
At their most accessible moments, and brief moments they are, Wolf Eyes create something akin to Nine Inch Nails at their most dissonant. The discordance draws heavily from late 70s bands like Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire, whose industrial experimentations became seminal in the noise genre.
Generally, “Burned Mind” creates two kinds of noise. The first is the thick walls of sound that blast unheralded out of the speakers, marching forward at a consistently slow tempo. The second is a sort of ambient horror, utilizing found sounds such as creaking doors, steam and the wind. These are the moments which make the album listenable, with the term listenable used in a highly subjective sense.
Not surprisingly, “Burned Mind” isn’t going to make sense to most music listeners. For once, this can’t be attributed to a close-minded public, but rather the esoteric qualities of such grating, difficult music.
-Jesse Cataldo
