We’ve all seen the movies: some day, and probably sooner rather than later, the subordinate machines that crowd our day-to-day lives will usurp us. Where once we used them for work or pleasure, they will now be known solely as harbingers of pain and destruction. When the final city falls, and the machines’ victory parade ploughs through the smoking rubble and still-warm carcasses, this will be playing loudly. ‘Burned Mind’ isn’t music; it’s a vision of a decimated future.
Gigantic metallic crickets swoop from the skies to snatch babies; warriors patrol the suburbs, brutally executing those that would stray from safety. Wolf Eyes score the whole thing in bloody detail. Where past Sub pop artists (believe me, this is more of an art project than a collection of music; there’s not the merest semblance of a tune anywhere, only punishing, electronic squall) have been praised for their subtleties, Wolf Eyes pen tracks called ‘Stabbed In The Face’, ‘Black Vomit’ and ‘Reaper’s Gong’. Your kid brother’s not going to put this on his Christmas list. Unless, of course, he’s actually one of them. When their army is complete, there will be no more Christmas. ‘Burned Mind’ is impossible to rate conventionally: it’s hellish beyond precedence; the sound of decay; a nightmare in waiting. It’s the opening salvo of the end of it all.
Everything alive today will some day die; 'Burned Mind' is the beginning of the rot.