Editor’s note: The views expressed in Hots On are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the outlook or beliefs of anyone else in the IST network.

A month or so ago I was hanging out with an old friend I hadn’t seen in awhile. It wasn’t awkward at all, but we aren't terribly close so the conversation was hopping from one thing to another in that rudderless, silence-avoiding way it goes when you've gone through all the gossip and most of the whiskey. At some point I remember him saying “So have you heard this band Wildildlife?” and me shrugging noncommittally, thinking, neat, another indie buzz band with a shitty name I’ll have to contend with in the future. What struck me was that my friend hadn’t heard a note from the band. They didn’t have a MySpace at the time, or one that made itself immediately apparent. He’d seen their name on a gig poster.

Eventually I got hold of a copy, as much to score it for my friend as to alleviate my entirely-manageable curiosity. The album is called Six, and it has seven tracks. Uh-oh, I remember thinking, maybe that's supposed to be clever...and they’re from San Francisco. But within five seconds of putting the record on, I knew I had something good on my hands: just the way the drums sounded, and how that introductory beat went on and on until you wasn’t sure if there was even a song there. And when everything came crashing into the mix, like some unholy union of Black Sabbath, Can, and the Pixies. Holy crap, I thought, they actually know what they’re doing.

“Things Will Grow” is probably one of the better songs released last year, but it’s also the only example of Wildildlife’s skewed pop sense. The entire rest of the record switches between full-blast drone-metal and plain self-indulgent nonsense. Wildildlife manage the curiously difficult task of making incredibly self-indulgent music that still manage to translate the anthemic big-rockisms like “hooks” through their sheets of drug-addled noise. Not that I have anything against drug-addled noise; just don’t act like it's a reasonable substitute for more good songs. And yet in the last few weeks I've listened to Six over a dozen times straight through. And it was only the first couple times I was searching futilely for more evidence of track one’s ear candy. I actually sort of got into the 18-minute Doors impression “Magic Jordan,” and once or twice I even let the self-explanatory final track “Nervous Buzzing” play out all the way without turning my iPod off. And as far as I know, my friend still hasn’t heard it (answer your FUCKING PHONE, ISAAC).

Several developments have raised my admiration for Wildildlife: for one, I discovered the album was reviewed in Decibel, a dyed-in-the-wool metal rag that typically features bands like Pig Destroyer on the cover. Six is not a metal record by any means, but it is, apparently, metalhead-approved, which by the transitive property of metal makes it me-approved. Confusing? Sure. But whatever, metal rules.

Secondly, I discovered a Canadian lo-fi band doing similar things with very dissimilar tools. Alberta, Canada’s Women take their cues from the blissed-out '60s sounds of The Zombies and the Hollies, but they certainly do not come from the sunny side of the street. The first track on their self-titled debut immediately sets hearts a-flutter with a toe-tappin' beat, but the tune abruptly cuts out at the 1-minute mark to make way for several minutes of impenetrable buzzing. They manage to drop a couple-three sublime Velvet Underground impressions and an excellent, shred-happy Captain Beefheart jam, in between pile-ups of ominous schizo-tones, but the two combine about as effectively as oil and water. In comparison, Wildildlife’s extremes of noise and pop seem like two sides of the same coin.

Still, there’s something about a band scarring their own near-perfect pop sensibilities with endless drones and haphazard sequencing that seems, well, regressive. Didn’t the Velvet Underground already do this perfectly, 40 years ago? And at this point, it’s as calculated a move as trying to get in bed with BrooklynVegan: after all, nothing screams “authenticity” directly in your face like holding out a perfectly nice, blissed-out pop song and then snatching it back and drowning it in a fetid pool of noise and laughing maniacally as you start to cry. For the record, I’m actually starting to warm to the reckless, frequently violent disregard of the boundaries separating good ideas from bad these bands share. But the balance is off--if we could just get to 60% anthems, 40% noise, we’d be good. Right now it’s more like 30/70. But who knows? In ten years this blip could actually be a cliche that screams “late 2000s.”

Wildildlife MySpace
Women MySpace