ALBUM REVIEW: WEREWOLVES - MY ENEMIES LOOK AND SOUND LIKE ME

PROLIFIC AUSTRALIAN FEROCITY DEALERS RETURN WITH ANOTHER NASTY

Like many others, I had a childhood crush on Annalise Hartmann from Neighbours and now Werewolves are seriously spoiling it. If said anodyne soap opera was Australia’s most gushy export, Werewolves are the nastiest and more so than Wolf Creek. In fact, take every trope and cliché about Australia of chilled outness and beach culture and all the rest of it and watch it all rot in Werewolves’ grim well of societal spite. Come to think of it, Australia has some absolutely raging extreme metal and given Werewolves have been quite prolific in their output over the last few years churning out piledriving modern death metal they are positioning themselves at the forefront now.

ruined

My Enemies Look and Sound Like Me is clinical, relentless quasi-mechanized ferocity from start to finish. Opener Under the Ground is pummeling viciousness of urgent buzzing riffs and demented growling. Werewolves deal unequivocally in ferocity and the strategy of this record seems to be shock and awe. The riffing is good quality though not overly technical or widdly, instead relying more on viscous bludgeoning for impact. The riffing style is often a kind of high-speed slaloming buzzsaw delivery with occasional breakdowns. Half-way through the record they slow things down temporarily in the horrific crawl of Destroyer of Worlds, but even that only lasts partially through the track before a blizzard of hateful snare abuse erupts. An indispensable component of Werewolves’ misanthropic racket is the precision brutalism of the percussion. The cataclysmic blast beats, double kicks and machine-like fills really propel and enunciate the brutality of the music.

The delivery has an atmosphere that evokes an older school sense of death metal dread but with a cool modern deathgrind violent edge and elements of slam. If you are made to understand anything from My Enemies Look and Sound Like Me it is that this band are pumped with hatred for lots of people and lots of things. It is a buzzy, bloody, paint-stripper cacophony of bile-filled ravings and is about as subtle as a road train head-on. But here is the thing: deep down in the rabid noise, there lurks something of a sense of morbid humour in some of the lyrics. You probably just don’t want to know what they find funny.

My Enemies Look and Sound Like Me is available via Prosthetic Records