Guitar Wolf - Beast Vibrator

This is a message I received.

I recently received a message from someone who was keen to tell me that while they enjoyed my blog, I would be a better writer if I attempted to write more objectively. I am always open to constructive criticism and I will therefore endeavour to stick to the facts as much as possible in this review. Objectivity is the watchword.

Guitar Wolf are a band. Guitar Wolf are a band from Japan. Guitar Wolf have three members. These three members are named Seiji, U.G. and Toru and are sometimes known as Guitar Wolf, Bass Wolf and Drum Wolf. That is a combination of the word 'wolf' (taken from the name of the band) and the musical instrument that these respective musicians play. Beast Vibrator is the name of Guitar Wolf's new album. This album is their 12th album, following on from Spacebattleship Love, Mars Twist, Dead Rock, Golden Black, Loverock, UFO Romantics, Rock and Roll Etiquette, Jet Generation, Planet of the Wolves, Missile Me! and Run Wolf Run. Guitar Wolf are a band that play very loud. Guitar Wolf are a rock and roll band. Guitar Wolf are a very loud rock and roll band. Their new album, which is entitled Beast Vibrator, contains eleven songs.

The first song on the Guitar Wolf album Beast Vibrator is Beast Vibrator. The second song on the Guitar Wolf album Beast Vibrator is Mesopotamian Lonely. The third song on the Guitar Wolf album Beast Vibrator is Gasoline Lullaby. The fourth song on the Guitar Wolf album Beast Vibrator is Ghostly You. The fifth song on the Guitar Wolf album Beast Vibrator is Robot Maria. The sixth song on the Guitar Wolf album Beast Vibrator is Batting Center. The seventh song on the Guitar Wolf album Beast Vibrator is Saphire CITY. The eighth song on the Guitar Wolf album Beast Vibrator is Magma Nobunaga. The nine song on the Guitar Wolf album Beast Vibrator is Barf Night. The tenth song on the Guitar Wolf album Beast Vibrator is EARTH vs. ALIEN. The eleventh song on the Guitar Wolf album Beast Vibrator is Female Machine Gun.

The first song on the Guitar Wolf album Beast Vibrator, Beast Vibrator, is a rock and roll song. It is loud. Beasts is a word used to describe undomesticated animals. Vibrator is an instrument used to provide sexual pleasure. This song is a wild animal that provides sexual stimulation and release.

The second song on the Guitar Wolf album Beast Vibrator, Mesopotamian Lonely, is a rock and roll song. It is loud. Mesopotamian is an adjective pertaining to the inhabitants and culture of the area now known as Iraq. Lonely is the sensation when you are isolated from other people and have negative feelings due to this isolation. This song is painful desert solitude.

The third song on the Guitar Wolf album Beast Vibrator, Gasoline Lullaby, is a rock and roll song. It is loud. Gasoline is the substance that is used to power many machines, including cars, motorcycles and chainsaws. Lullaby is a song that is sung to children to help them go to sleep. This song is powerful song that will ignite to make children sleep.

The fourth song on the Guitar Wolf album Beast Vibrator, Ghostly You, is a rock and roll song. It is loud. Ghostly is a word that descibes things which resemble the spirits of dead people. You are a bastard. This song is a haunting bastard.

The fifth song on the Guitar Wolf album Beast Vibrator, Robot Maria, is a rock and roll song. It is loud. Robot is a word, originating from the Czech playwright Karel Capek's book War With the Newts, that is used to describe an automaton capable of performing tasks. Maria is a popular name. It is often associated with Catholicism, or the van which takes prisoners to jail, which is known as a Black Maria. This song is machine built from wire and steel that will take your ass to jail.

The sixth song on the Guitar Wolf album Beast Vibrator, Batting Center, is a rock and roll song. It is loud. Batting is the action of striking a ball with a bat. Center is a word for the middle of things. This song strikes at the core.

The seventh song on the Guitar Wolf album Beast Vibrator, Saphire CITY, is a rock and roll song. It is loud. Saphire is a precious blue stone. CITY is a large built-up area in which many people live and work. This song is the blues in lives and works.

The eighth song on the Guitar Wolf album Beast Vibrator, Magma Nobunaga, is a rock and roll song. It is loud. is the substance that consists of molten rock underneath the world. Nobunaga is the name of a man who unified Japan. This song is unifying burn. Out of context, the word Nobunaga may appear to some English readers to be a nonsense word such as flubtredderling, weeewoopapapapabipdaaaaaaarswuix, or gluttle. This song is hot squabaloo.

This is the album cover of the Guitar Wolf album Beast
Vibrator. This album cover depicts the members
of Guitar Wolf imprisoned and looking super cool.

The ninth song on the Guitar Wolf album Beast Vibrator, Barf Night, is a rock and roll song. It is loud. Barf is a word for when you expell food and fluids from your mouth through a series of convulsions. Night is the period when the Earth is turned away from the sun. This song is a convulsion that will turn the world dark.

The tenth song on the Guitar Wolf album Beast Vibrator, EARTH vs. ALIEN, is a rock and roll song. It is loud. EARTH is the planet on which humanity originates, vs. is a term used to denote a fight or contest, ALIEN is a word for sentient beings not originating on planet Earth, also used to describe anything which comes from outside our realms of experience. This song is a fight between all that we know and all that we do not know.

The eleventh song on the Guitar Wolf album Beast Vibrator, Female Machine Gun, is a rock and roll song. It is loud. Female is a word used to describe women. Examples of women include Alice Bag, Tabitha Tate, Khutulun, Laura Jane Grace, Kathy Acker, Trina, Pauline Kael, and, in fiction, Storm from the X-Men. Machine Gun is a type of weapon that fires a great many bullets in rapid succession and is designed to maim and kill. This song is a storm of grace designed to main and kill.

This is a Guitar Wolf album. This Guitar Wolf album is named Beast Vibrator. Guitar Wolf are the best band in the world. Guitar Wolf are literally the best band to ever exist. Guitar Wolf are the sun rising and the night falling. Guitar Wolf saved my soul.

This has been an entirely objective review of the new Guitar Wolf album named Beast Vibrator. I would like to extend my thanks to my original correspondent for suggesting this new writing style predicated on balanced factual information. My first draft for this review contained sections such as this: "Mashing together words with a sort of bloodied and beaten glinting glee, Beast Vibrator, Gasoline Lullaby, Barf Night, Female Machine Gun. The trainwreck joy of Beast Vibrator, "V-V-V-V-Vii-iibrator!", trashrock noise, flailin out, the flushing wildness of Robot Maria, the whispering fuzz and dancing guitar spikes on Barf Night, the insane thrashblues of Mesopotamian Lonely, rubbing along with those huge sweeping guitar strokes over the bassruns, the shiver and crash of Female Machine Gun." which I now see were gauche and overtly subjective. Guitar Wolf need no such musings. Guitar Wolf are Guitar Wolf. Guitar Wolf are a rock and roll band. This is a Guitar Wolf album. It is loud.

RAMONA

Probably the greatest song ever written about the Ramones is R.A.M.O.N.E.S. by Motorhead, originally on the album 1916, later covered by the Ramones themselves, which rolls through, with vision and thunder, a flash of images of the Ramones urban knucklehead milieu: “Black leather, knee-hole pants/Can't play no highschool dance”

Then there's Guitar Wolf, who bite the styles of Motorhead and the Ramones in equal measure, Japanese noise superheroes in black leather, everything louder than everything else, cramming words together in a sort of impressionistic punk rock fuck you, where you can tell exactly what they mean, but also are incapably of explaining exactly what they’re saying, heirs to the ultimate cool of the Ramones, black leather jackets and simplicity, crunching out the surf-garage throb of the song Kung Fu Ramone Culmination Tactic.

Ramones tributes often come at their subject from the same sort of angle, with the same sort of shimmy, careening around in a 100mph coming together of that black leather, ripped up jeans, speed and noise, jukebox romance, communal shouts of the backpatch-cool stupidity slogans "GABBA GABBA HEY!" and "HEY! HO! LET'S GO!", an emphasis on the Ramones as a combination of teen heartthrobs, dangerous herberts and cretinous goobers. And an overwhelming desire to be joined with them somehow, to imitate, to hang with that crew, like on The Migraines I Wanna be a Ramone, which packs 40-odd Ramones references into its 3 minutes, going deep beyond the pinheads and the beaten brats, managing such lyrical feats as rhyming Mama's Boy with Animal Boy. There are also at least three other songs with the same title.  

A similar desire for assimilation exists on I Wanna Be Like Dee Dee Ramone by The Parasites. “I Wanna Be a Blitzkrieg Bopper/Wanna Be a Real Punk Rocker.” It's pleasingly reckless in its fuzz and scramble, but it does have the problem of focusing wholly on the punk rebel icon at the expense of the series of life experiences that defined Dee Dee, The Parasites never mention their desire to be a rentboy in 70s New York, have a lifelong heroin addiction, play in GG Allin’s band or release an unbelievably bad rap album that demonstrates all the flow and lyricism of a cartoon moose on barbiturates.

 The Spazzys have the song I Wanna Cut My Hair Like Marky Ramone, about wanting to cut your hair like Marky Ramone, but acknowledging "It's gonna look dumb, but it's gonna be fun." For the Spazzys, they don’t care if it means they can’t get a boyfriend, looking like Marky is way more important. A shitty momcut as being part of something greater, cheap self-mutilation to join the cult. Kinship with this group of impossible freaks.

 This is in the subgenre of songs specifically about minor Ramones. Generally the songs that focus on the Ramones revolve around the main core of Joey, Johnny and Dee Dee, Tommy, Richie, CJ and Marky kinda gets kicked to the curb or just short shout outs, though there is Tommy Ramone by The Vapids, a two minute biography that follows their first drummer from his awkward teenage years, "TROUBLE ALL AROUND!" is its repeated refrain. Elvis doesn't even get one song to my knowledge, but then again he only played two shows, whereas Marky was in the band for 12 years and even gets the indignity of usually being left off the iconic logo shirt in favour of Tommy. (Also, when the Ramones covered R.A.M.O.N.E.S. they changed the lyrics from “Hear Marky kick some ass” to “Marky takes it up the ass”)

Even Kung Fu Monkeys' I Miss the Ramones has to add "Let’s not forget Marky!" almost as an afterthought. I Miss the Ramones was penned around the Ramones break-up, serving as  framing them in a larger cultural narrative, running through post-war music history from the 50s onwards heralding the Ramones as heroes arriving in the nick of time “to save the day and take back radio” from the turgid indulgence of classic and prog rock. An idea which does have some merit, though the implication that the Ramones were also somehow responsible for exposing the Watergate scandal is probably a bit farfetched.

The Mr T Experience End of the Ramones says goodbye to the Ramones with a transcendent final show, everything coming together for a last 1-2-3-4 where the pang of goodbye is temporarily obscured by the blazing exit in spite of, or maybe because of, the beating life has given the four not-brothers “Joey is a vegetable Dee Dee's going bald Johnny got kicked in the head but the kids still love them all” 

They do and they still miss them. The loss is often palpable. Punk Rock Club RIP is mournful, the passing of a venue where good times were had, the Ramones were seen, friendships were made and jaws were broken, it's as sad as a song that bubblegum can really be and you can read the grieving for a show space as grieving for the Ramones also. Their mention is often punk rock shibboleth, a touchstone, like in The Queers anti-hippie anthem Granola Head, “I’d rather be at home, listening to the Ramones.” or in Screeching Weasel’s I Need Therapy as the painful result of this obsession lamenting the fact that he’s "O.D.'d on The Ramones cause I just sit around at home"

MTX, The Queers and Screeching Weasel being the Joey, Johnny and Dee Dee of the 90s Ramonescore revival, simplistic sharp catchy punk cuts on love and isolation and loss. Buzzpop barbs of that inspired the likes of The Transgressions with Baby I Love You (But I Need Someone to Talk to About the Ramones), in this, as in (The Huntingtons Jeannie Hate the Ramones, and The Creeps My Girlfriend Hates the Ramones) adoration for the Ramones is a relationship acid test. It’s probably Ramones-worship at its most juvenile, which is pretty fucking juvenile in a field which is an endless shambling parade of four-chord arrested development. Stylistically not amazingly interesting, the The Transgressions at least get out in 40 odd seconds of screaming, the Huntingtons and the Creeps rely on a mix of terrific pace and sloppy vocal collisions between dry whoa-ohs and snotty scrapes, to sustain themselves, until the Creeps song gets kinda slower and a bit boring. What it really points too though is that sort of teenage shortsightedness, music taste over all, judgemental punx exclusivity, a ridiculous shiteheaded personal integrity over compromise and happiness. How many people are there out there suffering just cos some girl ain't into. Is it really as common a problem as these bands make out? Similarly dumb but coming from the other directions are The Come Ons with She's Ugly But She Likes the Ramones (though that does put the Spazzys fears of loneliness to rest).

It might be these sort of bands which are put on blast by the goofball iconoclasm of Boris the Sprinkler’s Kill the Ramones released on a double A-side single with the song Kill the Sex Pistols, by a band that clearly loves the Ramones as much as anyone, once recording a whole album cover of the Ramones’ End of the Century. The Ergs! offer a less drastic solution pleading over a ripped off and muddied-up Teenage Lobotomy riff Xerox Your Genitals, Not the Ramones.

Of course, Kill the Ramones was written before the main three Ramones had actually died. Since the end of the century Dee Dee, Joey and Johnny have all bought it. My favourite version of Motorhead’s R.A.M.O.N.E.S. is on the 2005 live bootleg Stagefright where Lemmy introduces the song with a growl of "I was gonna stop doing this song last year, but then another one died, so I had to start all over a fucking again.”

Since then Ramones songs have leant even more towards the mournful, dug further into the loss, it works as well as the kisses and adoration, because the Ramones weren't just about the teenage bounce and gangs, Joey's voice was always capable of an edge of sadness in stuff like Danny Says and She Talks to Rainbows

 Joey Had to Go, a mid-tempo stomper, from Nomeansno ramonescore side-project, The Hanson Brothers, draws a vivid portrait of Joey as a sort of braindead intergalactic traveller, "He couldn't count past four. But he didn't need a whole lot more. He was weird all spindly and tall. Standing in his leathers up against the wall.” an impression probably fostered by their most famous on screen appearance in the Roger Corman classic Rock and Roll High School where the entire band comes across like spaced-out weirdos struggling to grasp the fundamentals of human interaction, Dee Dee endlessly baffled by the prospect of eating a slice pizza. Here Joey’s an alien being passing through, bestowing his wisdom and then he’s gone, more worlds to tear up, more galaxies to get hoppin. 

The Sloppy Seconds, still aren’t at that stage of acceptance yet, with the tightly-rhymed slamdance denial of You Can’t Kill Joey Ramone, “NO! NO! NO! JOEY DON’T GO!” it screams, “Save your prayers for Dee Dee” it pleads.

Not all of the songs deal with love and loss, imitation and destruction, for instance,  Frenzal Rhomb explicate the art/artist division in the song Johnny Ramone was in a Fucken Good Band But He Was a Cunt (subtitled GABBA GABBA YOU SUCK) but that’s an outlier. Most of them get their kicks in romance and pinhead longing.

 The crush of Helen Love’s Joey Ramoney, which portrays a long-distance desire over a sweetly skipping keyboard riff, sampling Joey’s hey-ho’s and running away with its own silly love. “There’s a girl who loves you on the other side of the world” it reassures Joey, perfectly capturing that bedroom-poster closeness you feel towards your teenage idols. Certainly more pleasant than The Maxies’ Sandy with its promise of “For you, Sandy, I’d dig up all the dead Ramones.”

 Amy Rigby’s Dancing with Joey Ramone, is, at least at first, mellow dancefloor seduction, with a possibly spectral Joey, who keeps his distance, as she copies every move he made. On the initial listen you get caught up in the gentle shuffle, and it comes across as resembling the adoration of Joey Ramoney, but on relistens it gets weirder and more aggressive ("I tried to say something/He said "Girl, shut your mouth, they're playing Papa Was a Rolling Stone") and besides, if you're copying every move he makes, Joey Ramone’s main move was leaning forward and looking scary as he shook his head about arrhythmically so really the scene’s less romantic than it might appear. At the end the unreliable narrator finds herself alone, but still stuck with those warm gluey memories as the song suddenly speeds up into Ramones pastiche.

 Sleater-Kinney’s I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone focuses on this heartthrob idea, usurping Joey’s place as an idol, with a rebel yelp. It's equal parts that imitation and destruction. Joey's a god, but one to kill. "I wanna be your Joey Ramone/Pictures of me on your bedroom door/Invite you back after the show/I'm the queen of rock and roll."

Delay’s Everything You Hate brings together that metaphorical power together with the complex interpersonal relationships, the tension and loathing that characterised the band for most of its existence, synthesising their place as icons with their reality as humans. “You say you don’t like the Ramones/But I think we’re a lot like the Ramones/Cos we look good together but we don’t get along/We’re a lot like the Ramones.”

Modern Life Is War's D.E.A.D.R.A.M.O.N.E.S. similarly mixes the reality with the fantasy. It's got that assimilative desire, but it's also from a point in time when the Joey, Johnny and Dee Dee are in the ground so it's way darker and more tortured in its cry of "Now I just wanna go back home and turn up my stereo/Until the rhythm melts my bones 'cause I'm a Dead Ramone"

Shonen Knife, known also as the Osaka Ramones, who have also released full albums of Ramones covers and played entire Ramones cover shows. The song Ramones Forever, tells the tale of a life lived through the medium of Ramones. It’s a simple process that has played out all over the world for the last 35 years. Day 1, hear the Ramones on the radio. Day 2, buy a Ramones album. Day 3. Start a fucking punk rock band. 

 The song triumphantly climaxes with a scene of Shonen Knife supporting the Ramones, which actually happened. This is one of the ultimate attractions of punk rock, that you can start a shitty band in your shitty town and then be sharing the stage with your heroes not long after, but, more than with any other punk band, the Ramones lend themselves to hero worship as much as best-friend fantasies the Ramones are definitely on pedestals. 

The inclusive/exclusive balance, the build-it-up/tear-it-down counterplay, where you can be part of something, you can change your last name to Ramone, but you're not a RAMONE-Ramone. You can wish to obliterate every idol, but you still need heroes somehow, that impossible thing to aspire to. You can get close, but you still got that gap. You’ll never quite be one of those four sloppily uniformed thugs, leant against the wall looking cool, but almost trying too hard to look badass and disaffected and ending up like some weird broken simulacra of teenage cool, all the more desirable for its sliced and mangled take on that languid adolescent pose. The Ramones are gone, whether you think them benevolent aliens or just a bunch of fucked-up dudes from New York, they're gone, but when  Shonen Knife sing “RAMONES FOREVER! MUSIC FOREVER! RAMONES FOREVER! PUNK ROCK FOREVER!” you don't really feel like they are, you feel like they're just around the corner, something eternal and drawn in the stars and much as their etched in brick and scrawled on toilet doors and commemorated in a thousand bad tattoos, a couple hundred sloppy punk rock songs. They meant something, they did something, yo, cuz 13 human beings have walked on the moon, but only 8 have been Ramones.

Not all of these songs are available on youtube, but you can track most of them down somewhere online. For a more complete detailing of songs about the Ramones, see this excellent list which I stumbled across while editing this piece.

Guitar Wolf

"The trend toward narcissistic flair has been responsible in large part for smiting rock with the superstar virus, which revolves around the substituting of attitudes and flamboyant trappings, into which the audience can project their fantasies, for the simple desire to make music, get loose, knock the folks out or get ‘em up dancin.’ It’s not enough just to do those things anymore; what you must do instead if you want success on any large scale is figure a way of getting yourself associated in the audience’s mind with their pieties and their sense of “community,” i.e., ram it home that you’re one of THEM; or, alternately, deck and bake yourself into an image configuration so blatant or outrageous that you become a culture myth." - Lester Bangs in the essay James Taylor Marked for Death from the absolutely essential collection Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung

So I try not to quote Lester Bangs too much, and I fail all the time, because he's the sort of person that when I started reading them seriously I was already leaning towards something approaching their style and approach in my own writing (I feel the same way about Le Clezio and his cascading torrent of words echoing the noise of society) and so reading them was a mixture of "Holy fuck! This is amazing! I'm not alone or insane! Someone is doing exactly what I want to do and doing it brilliantly!" and "Ah shit. This is amazing but it means I'm completely unoriginal. Someone is doing exactly what I want to do and doing it brilliantly." It's even worse with Bangs than Le Clezio because Bangs is not only offering far better writing than me, he's also often writing about the same shit. He hangs heavy over everything I pen. He is, after all, the man credited with the term 'punk rock'. So I try not to quote him too much because he frequently renders any insight I have utterly pointless (like Bill Hicks I can only thank my lucky stars he died horrendously young and thus did not have time to supercede everything and anything I want to say about shit) but it's unavoidable here, because if anyone has taken the culture myth approach to rock music, it's fucking Guitar Wolf.

You know how I should really conduct this review? I should just put the words GUITAR WOLF in screen-filling size and animate it so it flashes black and yellow and everyone who gets it will be like "FUCK YEAH!" and everyone who doesn't can go die in an office.

GUITAR WOLF, MAN! FUCKING GUITAR WOLF! GUIIIIIITAR WOLF, BABY! ROCK AND ROLL! GUITAR! WOLF! WOLF! GUITAR! WUITAR! GOLF! J-J-J-J-JET GENERATION! GUITAR WOLF! GUITAR WOLF! 1-2-3-4! GUITAAAAAAAAAR WOOOOOOOOOOOOLF!

That right there is a pretty accurate summary of the state of my brain as I walked out of the Islington Academy last Friday having seen the most awesome (in its original meaning before dumb fucks like me and the rest of the internet dulled it through inane overuse) display of pure rock and roll that I have ever had the ungodly fortune to experience.

Okay, so sonically, Guitar Wolf are the bastard children of Joan Jett, Motorhead, The Ramones and Link Wray, although they're probably stylistically more monomaniacal than even Lemmy's 35 years of making songs that go dananananaNAH! and they certainly have none of the attempts at pop hits that the Ramones indulged in from time to time. They are ascetics to the religion of rock and roll. Aesthetically, they are the bastard children of Joan Jett, Motorhead, The Ramones and Link Wray. They are garage punk, with the volume and attitude cranked so far off the dial that they trample carelessly around the shadowly borderlands of noisecore. And they look fucking cool doing it.

Every single Guitar Wolf album sounds pretty much the same (okay, so I haven't picked up the new one yet and didn't have enough cash to the other night but I don't think it breaks any new ground), but that's what's so wonderful about them. "Every time you do it, you dig deeper" as Ross MacDonald said when critics accused him of writing and rewriting the same novel over and over again with his Lew Archer series. Guitar Wolf are digging deeper into this almost primal rock and roll. Their song titles are built from a compendium of rock cliches, Midnight Violence Rock'n Roll, Machine Gun Guitar, Kung Fu Ramone Culmination Tactic and Sex Napoleon but they do it with enough unwinking verve that you just want to believe in it all again, all the 'yeah baby's and '1-2-1-2-3-4's and guitar solos and drum flourishes. All that silly stuff. The best starting place is probably the album Jet Generation, generally considered to be the apotheosis of their sound, possibly because it is claimed to be the loudest album ever recorded. Matador records claim "When we sent the new GUITAR WOLF record to the mastering lab for inclusion in our recent in-store play sampler, the mastering engineer called back, mystified by the volume level on the CD-R. The levels exceeded the theoretical maximum possible on compact disk audio. In other words, JET GENERATION is the loudest CD in history." How fucking cool is that? If you don't think that is cool, then maybe we cannot be friends.






The other possible starting point for Guitar Wolf is not an album, but their b-movie Wild Zero. In which they fight zombies and UFOs and look so fucking slick. Senji, Billy and Toru AKA Guitar Wolf, Bass Wolf and Drum Wolf. Shooting shit, shouting "ROCK AND ROLL!", riding motorcycles with flames coming out the back, blowing shit up, delivering a stringent anti-transphobia message, rocking the fuck out, saving the world, somewhere between spirit animals and rock and roll superheroes.




So the band took the stage. First Bass Wolf (U.G. since the death of Billy a few years ago), then Drum Wolf, then Guitar Wolf himself. Here are some of the things that happened during the next hour and a half or so:

• I've listened to almost everything they've done and they only played three songs I recognised, the opener UFO Romantics, Jet Generation and Link Wray's Rumble.


• They did play something that resembled the Dead Kennedys' Police Truck though.


• The guitar cable was fucked so the sound went out a couple of times but nobody appeared to notice (I didn't even notice this, I was informed by someone I was with after the gig).


• They did every single rock and roll posture, pose and move that should've gone out of style 40 years ago but made every single one look unbearably fucking cool, especially the whole "hold your guitar like a rifle and spray bullets of rock into the crowd" one.


• They were so completely into it from the very first moment that a couple of the guys we were with had popped out for a cigarette and when they came back in to see the band writhing about and playing guitar behind their heads they were like "Oh shit. This looks like the last song." when in fact it was the first song and the entire gig proceeded like that.


• They barely ever stopped making noise, each glorious rock and roll cacophony would be drawn out into a stumbling wind-down but before they did the synchronised blunt rock and roll ending they'd pump it back up into another song without stopping.


• Guitar Wolf dragged a guy out the crowd and gave him his guitar, which the guy clearly could not play but his thrashing around made no real difference to the sound being produced and it took a long time for Guitar Wolf to communicate to him in his limited English exactly which rock and roll moves he wanted him to do (it was basically like that scene from School of Rock where Jack Black teaches rock stance to the kids, but enveloped in huge colliding continents of noise), but it was still all deliriously entertaining.


• Drum Wolf did the ol' James Dean 'look cool while combing your hair' thing while just playing the bass drum.


• Bass Wolf had no G string, not even a tuning peg for one, lest he be tempted by the evils of something that clearly wimpy.


• Guitar Wolf broke a string and the guitar techs tried to give him a new guitar but he was like "Fuck it. I can still thrash this one".


• They did two encores, the first one really short, the second one after the PA had started playing music to signal the show was over but people were booing and chanting for more and I could see Bass Wolf arguing with the stage manager for one more. FIGHT THE POWER!


• This one more went on for fucking ages as Guitar Wolf pulled a load of the crowd on stage to form a four tier human pyramid on stage which he climbed to the top of and bestrode like a powerchord pharaoh briefly before it collapsed.


• After the show had finished, the house lights had come up and half the crowd had left, Guitar Wolf came back on stage just to pick up his shit but the people lingering about who'd just been rocked out of their mind cheered him and inspired by this he grabbed his unplugged guitar and with no mic or amp thrashed out a song in exactly the same sweat-shedding dramatic pose, grimacing as though being exorcised by the music, that he had adopted for much of the show when he was not thrashing about on the floor or leaning into the crowd, in almost COMPLETE FUCKING SILENCE while the audience stood and cheered "WOLF! WOLF! WOLF!" as though they could still hear the majestic racket that had just flayed them of their senses.

I know I'm forgetting some of the other delirious acts of rock and roll madness that took place, they may have been erased by the dark swirling mass of clamor and chaos that filled the room and got itself worked into the rustling fabric of my being. ROCK NOT LEST YE YOURSELF BE ROCKED!



Seeing them live changes the way you view the band, it makes you think even more than you ever did that they are actually rock and roll superheroes, but it also makes you stop thinking about individual songs as separate artifacts of that rock and roll. It makes you really understand why they're classed as noise-rock as much as they are garage-punk, because that constant onslaught of sound eats into you until silence feels utterly unnatural.

"The static’s like the sound of thinking. Not of any single person thinking, nor even a group thinking, collectively. It’s bigger than that, wider—and more direct. It’s like the sound of thought itself, its hum and rush. Each night, when Serge drops in on it, it recoils with a wail, then rolls back in crackling waves that carry him away, all rudderless, until his finger, nudging at the dial, can get some traction on it all, some sort of leeway. The first stretches are angry, plaintive, sad—and always mute. It’s not until, hunched over the potentiometer among fraying cords and soldered wires, his controlled breathing an extension of the frequency of air he’s riding on, he gets the first quiet clicks that words stat forming: first he jots down the signals as straight graphite lines, long ones and short ones, then, below these, he begins to transcribe curling letters, dim and grainy in the arc light of his desktop…" - Tom McCarthy, C

In contrast to Killer Dreamer and a lot of that sloppy garage-y pop-punk, where it does feel like a single perfect burst of mellifluous pop taken apart from the inside and also in contrast to something like Husker Du's New Day Rising where it often feels likes a song built hardy, smooth and true and then thrown screaming like a bag of cats into that sea of fuzz so it has to struggle and splutter to keep itself heard. It feels as if we're coming from the other side, delving into the dingy discord of the world, the latent thrum of the cosmos, pulling a brief harmonious moment out of the primordial clang. We're not talking taking a Chuck Berry song and filling it with the crackle of basement souls, not wrapping a sweet teenage love song in acidic folds of hiss, it's the molding the background noise of the planet and beyond into something you can scream along to, exposing the true rock and roll heart that lives inside the deafening rumble of rocketship lifting off, the faded roar of distant traffic and the static buzz of a thousand electro-magnetic signals degraded and spattering invisible against bodies and buildings, going further and further into the dancing soul of things, unearthing rock and roll as the sound of the tick of the universe until they're grasping the echo heard by Penzias and Wilson and shoving it into a Bo Diddley beat.

Near-pure noise music like Hanatarash is possibly the closest to this idea of bringing into the light the sound behind it all, amplifying that low-level echo of existence as one drawn out, stretched and mutilated rock and roll song, like that version of Justin Bieber's inane platitudinous sexless Baby slowed down 800% until attains an odd scraping beauty, we're looking at everything from the big bang on up until the heat death as a version of Overkill lasting aeons with a billion false endings, but Guitar Wolf are a step away from that, often live it seems as there is no structure to what's going on, like these adventurers and cosmonauts of the sonic void are aimlessly rolling around in the distortion and thrash, but then they'll grab onto a groove, snatch a drumbeat from infinity and shackle it, they're plucking guitar solos from the murk. "Because what they call passion actually is not some emotional energy, but just the friction between their souls and the outside world." as Stalker had it, or at a less wholly mythic level (it's a hierarchy of noise and Guitar Wolf are drawing both from the base big bang echo and the assorted descendant static that has followed and intermingled with it) it's something akin to GX Jupitter Larsen's noise novel Sometimes Never which starts with "Most thought the radio static was empty. They were quite wrong..." it says before 20 odd pages of phonetically rendered static, pages and pages of letters smashed together briefly asserting themselves into half-recognisable patterns that scamper away from your comprehension designed to be read out loud and make you like hissing/fizzing madman if you do it in public. Entering into this churning noise, they're bringing back melody and rhythm from the brink and passing it on to us as only true heroes can.

Because here's where the culture myth gets interesting, Guitar Wolf are not us. Jeff Rosenstock is. Lauren Measure is. Mikey Erg is. Biscuit Turner was. Even an exulted a figure as Mackaye or Rollins is still us. Still that ordinary person who does ordinary things, goes to the shop, stubs their toe, they just go out at night and play stunning angry beautiful music rather than relaxing with a boxset of Mork and Mindy, a cool Coors 16 ouncer or a Yukio Mishima novel.

But Guitar Wolf drag audience members on stage and hand them a guitar and then they're part of it, they've got the crowd cheering them on. One move and you're a rock god, Auxiliary Wolf, let me hear you howl. What Guitar Wolf do, and this is explicit in Wild Zero in which the main character is not the band but a fervent fan named Ace, is they make you a fucking sidekick to the madness. They draw you in. Like a Dr Who companion, or Willy DuWitt in Bucky O'Hare, or whatever lucky kid gets to visit the Justice League HQ this week and help save the day, you're just the odd little human drawn into this mission, this romantic excavation of sound with the tools of poses and postures and three-string basses, part of the crew even if your job is just to keep the radio on the right station, you're part of the myth, the Guitar Wolf gang. Get your jacket and sunglasses and point the axe at the nearest star, with the ache and groan of space-time behind us, there are rock and roll songs out there swirling between nebulae and black holes and it's our job to go and get them. We've all got a little overdrive and garage noise in our heads so let's use it, shape it, exploit it. Count us in Drum Wolf, we're along for the ride.




"Some religions say that the universe was started with a word, a song, a dance, a piece of music. The Listening Monks of the Ramtops have trained their hearing until they can tell the value of a playing card by listening to it, and have made it their task to listen intently to the subtle sounds of the universe to piece together, from the fossil echoes, the very first sounds.

There was certainly, they say, a very strange noise at the beginning of everything.

But the keenest ears (the ones who win most at poker), who listen to the frozen echoes in ammonites and amber, swear they can detect some tiny sounds before that.

It sounded, they say, like someone counting: One, Two, Three, Four.

The very best one, who listened to basalt, said he thought he could make out, very faintly, some numbers that came even earlier.

When they asked him what it was, he said: 'It sounds like One, Two.'" - Soul Music, Terry Pratchett