There is an almost infinite number of reasons to be excited for this Halloween weekend — costumes, candy, debauchery, devilment, the opportunity to quote the Geto Boys' "Mind Playing Tricks on Me."
All those things are great, but the big, big news is that Detroit savant-electronic provocateurs Wolf Eyes will drop their new LP, I Am a Problem: Mind in Pieces, via Third Man Records and will celebrate said release with a terrifying aural assault to Jack White's chocolate factory as part of the label/storefront/venue's annual Devil's Night festivities. It's a gig the band's John Olson is looking forward to.
"Being a spooky band, we're always playing [around Halloween]," Olson tells the Scene. "One time, it was, like, 2000, in Detroit, we had the idea to put on black hoods on with the eyes cut out, and we just got pelted with everything imaginable from the audience. ... I was working a corporate job repairing phone lines the next day [and] I was all bruised up and totally out of it, and we had a conference with the bigwigs in the morning. They were asking, but I couldn't really say I played a crazy electronic gig with a black hood on and got a bunch of stuff thrown at me."
Fifteen years later, Wolf Eyes still has that sense of unhinged, unaccountable danger. I Am a Problem, the band's first full-length in two years, is the latest entry in a catalog so deep your head would explode from the pressure of keeping track of just the limited-edition releases alone. This record finds the band in peak form, offering an equal-parts-fun-and-challenging set that's about as accessible as aggro noise gets.
More esoteric than most Third Man releases, Problem, for all its utopian-futurism, puts the band on par with midcentury avant-garde giants like Reich and Cage and Ra. This is marquee-level art music. It's also raw, damaged rock 'n' roll in the grand Detroit tradition.
"There's no real magical fancy story to it," Olson explains. "We had the record done and were trying to put the word out. We tried a few places and they didn't feel right. Then someone mentioned [Third Man co-founder] Ben Blackwell — that we should holler at him — and then it just went from there.
"It's nice to have a record done without having a guillotine-style deadline overhead," Olson goes on. "The decisions you make are a lot better when you're not forced into a corner."
Spared the guillotine, Wolf Eyes created one of the most slicing records of 2015, a self-described "trip metal" journey into intense sonic overstimulation, where minimalism becomes monolithic and every note (or anti-note) overwhelms the senses. The record rewards intensive listening and holds up under intense scrutiny. It's an album as visceral as it is vital, however temporaneous it may be.
"Every record is just another chapter in the book," Olson muses. "It's good to have those ideas down [as a] document of that specific time period. Forward ever, backwards never."
EMAIL MUSIC@NASHVILLESCENE.COM
