And Now The Part Where I Talk About Myself
Musicbanter regulars, you surely know all about my group Wolves In Sheepskin because I never shut up about us. Today I'll be reviewing our most well received (and best selling) album, Indecent Vibrations. This album is my second favourite of our output, with A Van Per Oven being my favourite. This music speaks to me because the group does what we love as opposed to what would sell or sound appealing, and I'm glad to say that I'm a member of one of my favourite bands.
Indecent Vibrations consists of four tracks ranging from 6 to 17 minutes in length. It is entirely improvised apart from basic song structures that I came up with ("when I start to do this, change to that"). Stryder Rymer plays guitar for tracks 1, 2, and 4 and mandolin on the 3rd, Christophe Bassett (myself) plays guitar on the first track, electronics on the second, and drums on the last two, and Zach plays drums on the first two tracks and guitar on the final two.
The opener, Robot Intestines has Zach on drums and Stryder and I on guitar. It starts off with a kickdrum assaulted with reverb before the guitars enter. The sound is noisy and industrial, which is why we named the track Robot Intestines. The first minute or so is slower and more droney until it breaks into a faster part where indigestion occurs in the robot's intestines.
The song carries on like this with the crazy and noisy soundscape offering a variety of electric guitar noises from myself and rumbling rif***e from Stryder. There are points where we slow back into the opening part before breaking into another chaotic passage. The track ends on a drone and closing drums. This one is my favourite track on the album, and one of my favourite WISK tracks overall. Everybody did a great job on this song, and I don't have a favourite player on it because the sounds meld together so well. We recorded this track in my garage and after we were done with this tune, my dad came out and said "why don't you play a SONG?" so we knew this was a really good track if he felt the need to say something about it.
The second track is Flashback, where Stryder is on prepared guitar, Zach plays a reverb box and drums, and I play effects-heavy theremin. This track clocks in at 17 minutes long and is the longest on the album. It starts off very ambient with the players trading echoey and strange sounds. Throughout the track the theremin abandons the ambient atmosphere that the other two instruments are creating and overlays them with other-wordly sounds. About 9 minutes into a theremin solo comes in that makes you regret taking the brown acid. The other instruments grow in intensity until the quasi-sudden end of the track.
Out of the four tracks on this album, this one is my least favourite, but it's still a great track nonetheless. We thought that Flashback would be an appropriate track name for obvious reasons.
Then we have the last two tracks which are rather similar but still very different animals. Anyeurysm, which is intentionally misspelled as a reference to our album Any of Many, is a noisy track where Stryder jumps on the mandolin, Zach plays the guitar, and I sit at the drums. It starts off with a tremolo guitar and mandolin trade-off combined with drums. There's one tom that really complements the track as it's very prominent and gives the track some semblance of order to the track. There are points where you can't even differentiate what's each instrument is doing as it's a great wall of noise. I'm rather proud of my drum work on this track, especially the from the point where I rapidly play the snare up until the end of the song. It carries on in the noise ridden industrial sounds until it ends abruptly (the reason for this being that my recorder ran out of battery, the actual performance ran at about 12 minutes).
The closing track, Echoes of a Distant Memory has the same line up as Anyeurysm but this time with Stryder on guitar. A strum of the electric guitar and the clunkety drums enter. This one has more standard drumming in the beginning that breaks into a fast paced, almost Han Bennink-esque style. The guitars on this track are anything but standard. They're very angry and inseparable, and that thing called melody that Trollheart is always going on about is gone from this track. Everything is lost in the wall of noise. The track continues on in the metal-influenced aggression that we hear in the beginning of the song until we get another abrupt end. Again, this is because of the recorder running out of battery.
This album was incredibly fun to make and I find it a lot of fun to listen to. The sound of this album is somewhat unparalleled in our other six albums, save for a vague similarity on some tracks from A Van Per Oven and the title track from Lizard of Ox, which sounds like Indecent Vibrations on heroin and bath salts. We found a unique kind of sound that's specific to us with this album, and that's something I'm glad that we've done.
For the art piece on this entry, I'm going to give you guys the album artwork to Indecent Vibrations. It's a photograph of the reflection of the inside of a drainage pipe. We got the lines to be really messed up by throwing rocks in the water and taking the photo right after.
