Fright fest
Paranoid times call for paranoid sounds in Wolf Eye’s chilling ‘Dead Hills’
By Samantha Radle
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The vocals growl the name of the song over and over, conjuring images of an abandoned village from which everybody has either fled from something gruesome or has been murdered.
You are taking a walk alone through a forest just after midnight. There is a warm breeze blowing through the empty field next to the woods, and the moon behind the clouds casts an eerie, unhealthy glow over the ground.
Frogs croak and crickets chirp in the background. The solitude starts to get to you, and then your mind starts playing tricks on itself. All of a sudden you can see things darting around out of the corner of your eye — horrible, dangerous things that could only come from the world’s scariest horror movie.
Strange, inexplicable noises emanate from places you cannot see. You start remembering every time you have ever been frightened, every time when you just wanted to close your eyes and make everything disappear.
Your heart races and the paranoia builds until you don’t know what’s going to happen next, but you know it has to be something terrible. You begin to descend into the gloomy pit of the forest, where you hear strange, bloodcurdling screams that could be animal or human.
You don’t know what it is, but something awful is happening, and it’s coming closer.
This isn’t the first scene of a horror movie. This is “Dead Hills,” the first track on Wolf Eyes’ collection of three “songs” by the same title — which plays like the soundtrack of a horror movie from the future.
This is no pleasant background music. Whatever your worst fear is, you can hear it magnified a thousand times in this album. The macabre noises, spooky ambience, tense buildups and chaotic climaxes come together to produce a disturbing 25 minutes.
The fear conveyed in this album is both physical and mental, which is part of the album’s magic, as if they’ve found a way to turn paranoid thoughts into a sound.
After you are thoroughly disturbed by the first song, “Dead Hills 2” starts. This isn’t about the tangible things that can scare you; this is what your own mind can do to turn you into a quivering puddle of anxiety.
The song sounds like someone being murdered underwater with a chainsaw. Unlike the first track, this one has vocals — incomprehensible, tortured, inhuman sounding vocals that invoke more dismal images. If you happened to hear this song on the best day of your life, it would make you think that you’ve somehow died and gone to hell.
The album finishes with “Rotten Tropics,” which is, like the other tracks, accurately named. The vocals growl the name of the song over and over, conjuring images of an abandoned village from which everybody has either fled from something gruesome or has been murdered.
Palm trees flutter in a strange breezeless environment, as the sky darkens and icy rain begins to fall. Slow, morose percussion drones on in the background as the vocals become more urgent.
It is the fact that Wolf Eyes’ “Dead Hills” is an unabashedly colorless album that gives it its force. It is the grayish-black tone of every shadow that has ever blocked your view and the screeching sounds of all regrets and fears.
You may not put this album on when you are driving your car or reading the newspaper on Sunday morning, but it should be heard if only for the fact it has never been done before: an incredible feat when you think of how long music has been around.



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