(Australia’s Werewolves are still on track to release 10 albums in 10 years or kill themselves, and our guy DGR continues running right along with them. This time he has managed to write up their newest album (the 7th in the sequence) before its release — which arrives tomorrow via Back on Black.)
Early on within the bounds of the new Werewolves album You’re Weak and You Know You’re Weak, there is a moment in which vocalist Sam Bean declares, “I thought I told you to fuck off on the last album,” and I honestly had to check.
I understand that time gets the best of us all, and truthfully, none of us is getting any younger – though I don’t seem to be speed-running the baldness race at least – but I will admit my memory isn’t what it used to be. The sectors of my brain originally meant for family members’ birthdays that I have since overwritten with things like bands and its constituent members’ side-projects are slowly failing as well, and I know this. So when the philosophical maestros behind Werewolves are asking me if I was in fact told to fuck off somewhere in the liner notes of last year’s album The Ugliest Of All, perhaps they did.
But truthfully, at this point in our tacitly agreed upon “an album every year” suicide pact, perhaps the crew and I are at the “old men at the retirement home yelling at each other across the room” stage of our lives. Am I weak enough to know that I’m weak if I can’t remember that I’m weak in the first place?
You’re Weak and You Know You’re Weak is the latest album in Werewolves’ continuing quest to write the most braindead yet somehow still surprisingly involved songcraft over the course of ten albums, one each year. We’ve been along for the ride for some time now, though the writer of each specific review has rotated. Generally speaking, Werewolves moves in iterations. The project’s intentional design is not to have massive artistic leaps, it is more a testament to the group’s ability to draw blood from a stone. Yet they have played with different ideas and inspirations across the course of their artistic puddle jump, and so some albums have been a little more doom metal, some more black metal, but mostly they’ve all existed within the same realm of making sure that drummer David Haley remains marathon-fit by the time any specific album closes out.
Werewolves‘ consistent pattern of wasting our time while not wasting any time remains firmly in place on You’re Weak and You Know You’re Weak. Although not quite as steadfast in the eight-songs, forty-minutes pattern that Finland’s Wolfheart have etched into their practice room walls, Werewolves have generally kept their albums to eight or nine songs and a squirrel’s ball over a half hour every time. The only break on that front was the Deathmetal EP – which to this date has felt like such an anomaly that I’ve brought it up in every one of my write-ups about Werewolves since they did it. I imagine at this point whatever they call the end of this grand experiment in tongue in cheek disposable by force is still going to have me in the background going “Hey, remember that EP right in the middle of all of this?! What a wildly productive year that was!” We both have evolved by our nature into creatures of reflexive repetition.
At this point the Werewolves breakneck pace in both songwriting and chosen tempo is to be expected, and You’re Weak and You Know You’re Weak is one of their releases that rarely lets up. They have in the past had songs that slow down in solid and steady groove for a bit, but their new album ensures that you could pick a random twenty-second snippet from any point at the album and have pretty good odds that it is going to sound like falling into a cement furnace.
Werewolves have been steadily segueing themselves out of a death metal focused mood for a few albums – with artwork of corpse piles abounding to match – into music that is more dry and fiery. You’re signing up to get sandblasted this go around, so even though the band aren’t any less angry than before, a song like “Burn It To The Ground” or “Triple Negative” is oddly more fitting within the confines of this current incarnation of the band.
Werewolves exist at an extremity scale of 9 at all times though, and given its imagined exponential nature some of these songs pushing their redline measurements into 9.1 and higher is fitting. “Uroboric Fuckwit” opening up the album makes perfect sense given that at this point the Werewolves dipshits yelling insults at us in song form is oddly therapeutic and strangely relaxing. It has become the October comfort food to let the hellfire guitar and non-stop drum assault wash over you.
On equal footing we do occasionally find ourselves blessed with a song like “The Song Of Stupid Men”, which somehow, even seven albums in, finds a good balance among the many influences and extreme metal genre-splicing that Werewolves have locked horns with and results in something truly ferocious. Propelled by a chaotic opening and high-speed thrash riff, broken out on its own “The Song Of Stupid Men” may wind up being an unintentional highlight even as it stubbornly insists on its individuality, and that is as angry as the rest. “Fields Of Suicide” is one of a two bulldozers on the album wherein Werewolves leap past the knives-out assassination of music that they’re normally committing and into something highly “technical sounding”. They meld this with rhythm sections that are consistently grandly forward, and the juxtaposition puts “Fields Of Suicide” well in the “overwhelm by force” category alongside “Tank Habit” and the especially dumb title song “You’re Weak and You Know You’re Weak”.
Werewolves‘ existence is a rabid battle with diminishing returns. The experiment of hammering albums at the pace they do and with the pre-written rule of the music being as “stupid” as possible – I.E., jokingly disposable yet not really, more dedicated and intense than you would assume – does mean that by their nature Werewolves have adopted a sound and style. It is one not easily replicated, obviously given the “tongue through cheek” nature of how they approach things, and You’re Weak and You Know You’re Weak is no different.
However, that final push in these last few albums does translate to the band having to work harder in order to maintain some semblance of interest on both a listener front as well as on the other side of the equation. This is how you get the aforementioned iterations on Werewolves’ sound with releases that do sound a smidge enough different to justify their existence – and eventual sale as music for car commercials when the band put their whole catalogue up on the auction block; at near one-hundred songs they’d be practically giving them away to whomever takes that deal.
You’re Weak and You Know You’re Weak places Werewolves firmly on their path to auditory self-destruction, retaining the continued teeth-baring you’d come to expect from the band while also unleashing guitar parts well in the black metal sphere. Werewolves sound infernal on the album, picking up the baton from The Ugliest Of All while moving ever so slightly forward so it doesn’t just sound like a one-for-one carbon copy. As long as they have external media replete to sample and stitch on to the end of every handful of songs, the Werewolves guys should be plenty well suited to continue their quest in finding out who has more willpower and stupidity in equal measure, them or the listener.
In other words, You’re Weak and You Know You’re Weak is another solid entry in their overall collection while bucking the trend of “lucky” number seven by just making it “number seven”.
https://www.plastichead.com/artist/werewolves
https://werewolvesdeathmetal.bandcamp.com/album/youre-weak-and-you-know-youre-weak
https://www.facebook.com/werewolvesinhell/