Wildildlife - Six
First, that's not a typo. The band name is really that terrible.
And normally that's a red flag for me. While I've liked a lot of great bands that have shitty fucking names over the years (hello Turn Around Norman!), bad band names are sort of like Christianity to me. While I won't dismiss them out of hand, when I find out someone is a Christian (or a band has a shitty name), they have to work a little bit harder to win me over.
This paragraph has nothing to do with anything, but I'm listening to my headphones while I'm typing this and it's really dry in my house, so when I shifted one of my earbuds came lose and fucking shocked my ear. Ouch.
Anyways, Wildildlife is a terrible name. To add insult to injury, the album cover is also an abomination. It looks like the pre-revisionist Killing Is My Business... And Business Is Good! Megadeth album art, but somehow worse. Red flag number two. As an example of my disdain for bad album art, I still have no idea what And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of The Dead sound like because I was so offended by their horrifically bad Krishna cover art that Todd showed me in his car one day that I went out of my way to never hear them. They could be the greatest band on the planet but I wouldn't know because it looked like someone mixed up their art with Shelter's at the printer.
This is derailing fast, so let me try to bring it back on track.
Despite the terrible name and artwork, I gave this a shot based on the description on the Crucial Blast site (who put it out), and I'm glad I did.
Have you ever accidentally stumbled on a band you'd never heard of and been completely blown away by it? That's how I feel about this record.
Which is weird, because normally I hate records like this. I strive for consistency, focus and clarity of vision in all things, most of all music. Years and years ago, I read an interview with Paige Hamilton from Helmet and he said "Something good always sounds familiar," and it really resonated with me. As a matter of fact, Helmet started sucking when he stopped adhering to that. With regards to bands and albums, that's sort of been my frame of reference for about fifteen years, so it's strange that I'm so taken by a record that's all over the map. It seriously swings from really poppy to metal riffing to super epic to suffocatingly heavy to gorgeous melodies to blissed-out drones to crazy fucked up noise to balls-out rock; often within a single song.
But somehow, in what I can only call a fucking miracle given the often seismic shifts in tone and style, it comes off as being remarkably cohesive. The consistent and killer production definitely helps in this; it's extremely raw and guitars and vocals swirl in a haze of delay and feedback. More important, though, is how the band makes all of these changes sound organic. Nothing feels forced, and despite the fact that no song ends up remotely the way they start, they always wind up in a place that makes sense within the overall whole. Even parts that feel a little clunky-where you're trying to figure out how it fits in and where they're going with it-suddenly slide into place when they gradually shift an underlying part or add something on top of it. Everything clicks into place within the context of the song, and the songs then click into place within the greater context of the album as a whole. For a record that at almost any given moment feels crude (owing to the raw production) and extremely primal (these guys seriously beat the shit out of their instruments), in terms of song structure it's remarkably sophisticated. Listening to the record in its entirety is an adventure; you're never really sure where you're going to wind up next.
This is one of those situations where the whole is definitely greater than the sum of its parts. Which isn't to say that the parts in and of themselves are bad; they're often totally amazing. But like I said before, some of them feel a bit clunky and sometimes taken on their own they can feel a bit aimless and drifting. The way these individual pieces fit into the greater proverbial puzzle, however, are often revelatory; after multiple listens I still find myself being surprised at their remarkable sense of intuition.
So yeah, fans of awesome shit: take note. Despite the terrible band name and poor man's Megadeth album cover, Wildildlife's Six is a mish-mash of genres and tones that somehow transcend it's complete disregard for conventions to create something that sounds remarkably fresh even while wearing its influences on its sleeves. I've never heard anything quite like it. Your mileage may vary, but like I said somewhere in this train wreck of a review, I was blown away by it. I can't recommend it enough.
