Wolf Eyes

Bright Eyes is a hypersensitive singer/songwriter who has mastered the musical equivalent of nervous breakdowns. He’s a decongested Bob Dylan who basically cries on key. If that sounds like something you’d enjoy, be very sure never to check out Wolf Eyes by mistake. This trio’s glass-shredding output forcefully jerks tears instead of shedding them. On its more than forty releases, most confined to cassette, Wolf Eyes combines angrily buzzing static, pained saxophone yelps and intimidating layers of aggressively dissonant noise. Taken as a whole, its compositions would be the perfect soundtrack for film footage of an ungainly, diseased bird squawking at an ungodly volume, encountering a plate-glass window with a sickening splat and dragging its sharpened talons against a chalkboard wall as it slowly descends, whistling a maddeningly melodic tune born from the depths of its near-death dementia. But though the group’s hooks can function as life preservers in its acid seas, most of its musically masochistic fans come to feel the burn.