Willzyx – “I Don’t Feel Anything”
I’ve always liked the idea of experimental/noise/avant-garde music but most of it fails for me.
Which I guess kind of makes sense because most scientific experiments fail until over a period of time, the experiments reach some form of success.
And it’s true that nothing becomes new without some form of experimentation taking place.
So artists, working in any media, that do this are certainly commended by me.
I just don’t want to be subjected to most of it!
But with Willzyx who describe themselves with such terms as metal/grind/math core/no wave/noise rock-
I feel not only do they succeed in the experimental/noise genre but also, have a strong undercurrent of punk bubbling through their music.
So I deem their experiments (songs) a rousing success.
Let’s check up on what they’ve cooked up for us in their lab: (And heavens NO! It’s not meth).
“Dissension Plan” sounds like you’re going through a car wash while playing a vintage video game. Or perhaps you’re an Eskimo in an igloo hearing the freezing, winter winds rip by while you surf on the internet. Either way this is a cool, ambient instrumental.
With a pounding, supersonic Bo Didley beat “flexible lies” has radioactivity transmissions splattered all over it. While the vocal sounds like as if someone is holding the singer up by his neck against the wall as he’s pleading for his life. The chorus seems to suggest when the knife actually enters his jugular vein. But the song quickly returns to the funky, dissonant hypnotic trance-like groove. A wonderfully, disruptive, expressive tune.
“Priceless Soul, A Dangerous Subject” begins with repetitive, dissonant guitar lines that answer each other. But while this orderly madness is going on, all hell breaks loose with wild, emotional beats and vocals that scream and wail in exasperated agony.
Halfway through the song we slip into a slowed down nightmarish section that is both spooky, spacey and ambient- until the song wrenches back to an intense, furious conclusion. A priceless song in my estimate.
With some tones suggesting bells or foghorns going off in the distant and three alternating guitar notes creating an eerie, atmospheric introduction “We Can Live Our Deaths In Peace” begins.
It creates a scene of a foggy, midnight- moonlight on a dock by a small body of water that suggests something terrible and ominous is about to occur.
And once the vitriolic vocals enter along with some forceful drum rolls plus a guitar sounding like compressed television static we know we’re on for a different kind of cruise.
There is an intense tension that is created in this song that is not only scary but exhilarating. Portraying the fine line between peril and danger alongside excitement and ecstasy.
This song suggests the torments of hell while uplifting you into an euphoric heaven.
While signaling the end to a great EP.
“So pack your things, we’ve got to go, not too far away. Follow me and I’ll show you. Come on this way. We can live our deaths in peace, where illusion’s self-induced. I’m going underground.”
Maybe Willzyx might be too weird and experimental for you. Maybe you feel they don’t really fit in with the bands I write about.
For all I know, the band might feel that they don’t belong on TNB. I think probably not, but it would be fine with me if they did think that way.
I just know for me that with every note, every beat, every second of their music- that it hits me fully and unequivocally as punk.
And with all their ambitious experimentation it still wallops me with the precision and passion of James Brown (who was a punk R&B artist), and with a vocal style and lyrics that embody the energy, excitement and discontent of hardcore music, along with the wildness and creativity of an avant-garde rock band like Pere Ubu (one of my favortites who found a home in the early punk scene even if musically, they were more from outer space).
This band is from New Hampshire and remind me a little of another strange band I really liked from there- Crystal Methodist- but I guess both bands music were more aligned with outer space than the state they’re from.
But I do feel their edgy, abrasive music and words fully represent what a lot of people are feeling in a world and society that can be so threateningly cutthroat and absurd at the same time.
The strain, the struggle, the discontent is well reflected in their music.
So this is not punk music or even hardcore but in intent and emotion it is as anti-authority and questioning as punk, bursting with as much energy as hardcore while being intensely hard as metal.
And, in my opinion, not only meeting those requirements about the genres I write about, but creating work that ranks them up there with the best bands of all those genres, as well.
Perhaps my review reads like an apology of why I’m writing about them and if that’s how it comes across- then I apologize!
But Willyzx need not answer to anybody for creating such great, original music that doesn’t fit neatly into any category.
This is one of the best releases I’ve heard this year.
And that’s the best reason for it being here.
(Slimedog)
