CD reviews

Akron/Family and Wolf Eyes
by Bernardo Rondeau

Akron/Family
Meek Warrior
(Young God)
Rating: 3 out of 5

The music on Akron/Family’s second proper album-or third, if you count their “split” disc with Young God honcho Michael Gira’s Angels of Light project-is ridiculously ecstatic. Its seven tracks map a rugged topography where volcanic streams of freeform electricity burst forth from jangling folk serenity; brass ripostes tear through the clattering chatter of chiming guitars and everyone always sings. Far bolder than the young quartet’s remarkably eclectic, self-titled 2005 debut, Meek Warrior is a brief but vivid collage of psychedelic invention. Punched-in practically mid build-up, opener “Blessing Force” is a nearly 10-minute journey through the record’s various climates. Drums pulse and rumble in a fierce lockstep as riffs and noodles lock into serpentine grooves but pause as a maelstrom of voices-mumbling, murmuring and shouting-and spastic handclaps launch the track into rock god orbit before crumbling gently but suddenly into a shimmering acoustic trawl that happens upon a raucous wilderness of rampant noise and fluttering sax scrawls. Less prog bombast than run on sentence, its constant morphs seem to evince a band so ripe with ideas and sounds that it must sprint through all of them at once before inspiration fades. Though hardly a long-distance haul, “Gone Beyond,” which follows this lysergic cavalcade, takes a single, mantric refrain and slowly opens it out onto the cosmos with churning acoustic radiance. But there’s still hurly-burly aplenty as “The Rider (Dolphin Song)” ups the skonk and schizoid currents and, like the more serene astral excursions of “No Space in this Realm” and closer “Love and Space,” plays with choral incantations in the galactic style of Sun Ra’s Arkestra. Not merely a nod to the Alabaman jazz mystic, Akron/Family’s bellows of “a true spaceship/ has no destination/ only direction/ no destination” loudly speaks to their own fluid imagination.

Wolf Eyes
Human Animal
(Sub Pop)
Rating: 3 out of 5

For their sophomore Sub Pop release, Michigan’s Wolf Eyes amplify doom and portent instead of thrashing decibel violence. Borrowing from the Melvins’ lexicon, much of Human Animal can be easily called “hostile ambient” audio. All rubble and gray skies, it is haunted by the probability of further attacks on its already bombed-out expanse. Alas, it is an album for our end times: swathed in the stench of burned obliteration. Lingering in the unsteady edges of improvisation, the rancid drift of opener “A Million Years-” all metallic lashes and booming crashes, disturbing a silence already agitated by frittering filth-spills into “Lake of Roaches,” a pool of tinny, freehand frequencies. In the eight-minute “Rationed Rot” toxic plumes lingering over flaming spills of noxious ring-modulator fluid and droning crashed engines-the apocalypse’s caravan can already be spotted on the horizon. A caustic clutter of pummeling beat shrapnel, writhing squeals, chainsaw rattle and corrosive barf, the album’s title track and “Rusted Mange” altogether submit nearly six minutes of unmitigated aggression. Riled and anxious, the remaining two tracks spike abruptly with hiss leaks and fuzz blasts-sudden and sharp like electrode shocks-that jolt their deep, blurry sprawl. As a bonus, the CD edition of Human Animal finds Wolf Eyes engaging in some semiotic malignance: They impossibly “cover” No Fucker’s “Noise Not Music.” This nominally subversive detournement-applying the most rockist of conventions, the cover version, to its mutant antithesis, noise-may underline the band’s acerbic dialectics which finds entropy played like it’s a broken tone generator.