(DGR‘s been killing some brain cells with Werewolves again, whose new album is out July 12)
I’ve discussed this before, and our cohort Andy has also brought this up a few times, but the idea of listening to hundreds upon hundreds of albums a year – as if the larger the number the more impressive it is as a metric of how clever and cultured you are – has always bit at my side a little bit.
Of course, it’s worth noting that I am a fool with bad management skills, so it is therefore feasible that you could actually have listened to 3-4 times as many albums as there are days in the year – and in my younger days I too, would’ve bragged the same.
But focussing on the numbers makes things kind of ephemeral and disposable doesn’t it? As if all music were just a fleeting experiences designed only for your immediate satisfaction and nothing else.
Surely, the artist who has strived for months over songs, figuring out transitions, how to layer and arrange things, chased tones for hours, before finally settling on the specific composition being played before you deserves more than to be added as just one more point on an infinitely increasing bar on a graph?
Early in my writing I used to be proud of the fact that I was on time (or early) with many albums. But nowadays that’s less the case, as I like to deep dive into things and absorb the release for everything it has to offer.
I still do land the occasional early or on-time review but much like a baseball player slowly coming off of ‘roids, those stats are cratering and cratering hard. Everything instead finds room when the olde’ brain machine manages to turn enough cogent thought into something to discuss with you, the reader, when it comes to a new album. I care more about the discussion and experience of a release than I do the timeliness of it.
Which brings us to Die For Us… where absolutely none of this bullshit applies.
Werewolves are a familiar name around here as chief proprietors of some of the intentionally dumbest music around (and we mean that, as always, as a compliment).
They’ve been on a tear lately as well, with an album released – about nine songs/forty minutes every time – every year since their initial formation, plus one EP during a particularly productive run in the lead up to From The Cave To The Grave‘s release in 2022.
This of course, runs counter to almost every argument presented in the opening paragraphs as the sheer relentlessness of both the band’s release schedule and their unerring, screaming-at-the-drywall delivery suggests that Werewolves want their music to be the equivalent of musical flash paper – a quick conflagration and then its done – the event having exited the cognitive space before you even consciously register just how much the lyrics in a particular song might’ve been targeted at you as a listener.
The thing though, as evidenced by an album like Die For Us, is that Werewolves very much do care about their craft – they’re very good at it and they are killer at writing a multitude of knife-sharp, ear-rending guitar riffs which basically require drummer Dave Haley to blast his ass off for minutes on end.
They’re so skilled at manic ferocity that even considering their ridiculous release rate – which is starting to achieve what gaming luminary Jeff Gerstmann once referred to as “Mario Kart syndrome” (in which your first one is your favorite one, regardless of quality) – Werewolves are still pumping out exceptionally solid albums, as long as you’re prepared for what you’re in for.
It almost makes you empathize with them as artists, until you realize that the band themselves likely have no idea of “empathy” as an existential concept – that brainpower long having been burnt out by a triumvirate of heavy drinking, Australian Rules Football (AKA a fight where a ball is sometimes present), and maintaining a fun accent that I still refuse to believe isn’t at least somewhat pretend.
Now, my work doesn’t allow headphones – something about being within a construction warehouse environment and ‘needing to be alert of your surroundings’ has made it so that all music becomes a communal experience via bluetooth speaker or aux cable – which has led to quite a few of my co-workers getting an unwanted ten-plus hour education in the world of heavy metal (often increasing in intensity as the night goes on because at a certain point even the breakroom coffee isn’t strong enough – though it’s great for resurfacing the parking lot – and you just need the sheer force of “dumb” to power you through the back half of the shift).
In between watching me rush to the radio to skip the movie samples that Werewolves like to tack on to their songs – don’t fret, Die For Us has plenty (though nothing as perfect as the resigned ‘…oh, fuck it‘ that opened From The Cave To The Grave) – one of my colleagues noted that “these albums just sound like rifle fire“.
Which, in a way, is kind of perfect for about every Werewolves disc and Die For Us is no different in that regard, following the band’s brutal blueprint to a “T”, every song propelled forward by a ferocious mix of Blackened Death Metal riffing and a drum section so pneumatic you start wondering if you should be measuring things in RPM rather than BPM.
Die For Us is not an album bereft of highlights; for as much of the underlying theme so far here being that Die For Us is a reliably Werewolves-sounding album the group do still manage to pack in a few surprises. The core music placed here is strong, just as it has been for the previous four expulsions from the band and you could easily draw a graph placing Werewolves’ music anywhere between a seven to nine scale and find that the band never waver from a line cutting through the ‘eight’ mark.
And while some consistency is obviously to be expected to, given that Werewolves have been tackling these albums in blocks, often recording the material for multiple albums in one run, this doesn’t mean that Die For Us is an album bereft of highlights, beginning with the terrifying title-track which seems to draw from the same warehouse of savagery and/or stupidity from which the band pulled “I Don’t Like You” and “Self Help Book Burning” on previous records..
Sure, Werewolves have had five albums now of acting super-elitist and discussing their hatred for the world, so there’s no real curveballs being thrown here – the viciousness levels remain so high that you can segue from the titular “Die For Us” right into the equally mean “Beaten Back to Life” and “Fuck You Got Mine” without the band ever seeming to take their foot off the accelerator – but that’s not necessarily a bad thing, because the day they do toss in something that isn’t just an infernal flamethrower for the better part of three to four minutes the sudden shock will probably cause the world to stop spinning and Los Angeles to fall into the ocean.
Luckily we’re probably an album or two away from any “serious” iteration of the band’s sound – although “We All Deserve to be Slaves” hints at a bit of serious reflection and reassessment – and right now Werewolves are still happy to just iterate in small movements, with some sections being more blackened, others more “pure” Death Metal… but always, always, based on relentlessly grinding their guitar strings into choking metallic dust.
There’s something freeing in covering an album like Die For Us, wherein the expected nature of the music and its quality is so well-known by this point that this whole article could kind of been summed up as “you fucking know what you’re in for“.
It allows the brain to wander, much as the creative’s curse often causes someone to have their best or most inspired idea while standing in the shower, driving home from work, or thirty seconds before falling asleep.
And the thing about something like Die For Us is that you’ll have plenty of time for the creative dam to finally break because you really don’t have to think when listening to these guys. Its straightforward and self-admitted stupidity, the perfect example of just why we enjoy this “caveman breaking rocks” style of music.
We can romanticize and interact with it as much as we like and dance around in the album’s entrails in much the same way as the artwork seems to be covered in it, but – at the end of it all – you still have another Werewolves disc that’s the equivalent of sticking your head into a blast furnace while someone repeatedly smacks you in the stomach with a sledgehammer.
It’s great.