Rewind::::::::

Got a slightly perplexing review in Now

Shows that rocked Toronto last week
Thu, Jan 8

critic's pick AIDS WOLF at the Boat Rating: NNNN

In the post-Avril Lavigne era, it’s hard to imagine punk rock evoking any trace of the transgressive and revolutionary ideas that once fuelled the movement. This sanitization of the genre is what makes the barely listenable, eardrum-grating cacophony of bands like Montreal’s AIDS Wolf important and worthy of the masochism needed to appreciate them.

Philly noise terrorists Satanized set up the headliners well with a barrage of angular discordant rock, often sounding like a thrash metal band playing free jazz. The club was already full, and the sloppy mosh pit was eager to bounce around to their chugging skronk rock.


AIDS Wolf also tread some weird middle ground between experimental improv and punk rock, but sound even less connected to anything musical. It’s like they took everything that normally makes a song pleasant to the ear and deliberately did the opposite. Repetition and rhythm are the only elements you can recognize as music.

On paper this sounds awful, and it’s even worse in person at deafening levels (which is kind of the point, I suppose). But there’s something inexplicably hypnotic and engrossing about this train wreck of a band.

They may look like wimpy art school kids, but their noise could have squeegee-wielding gutter punks covering their ears and running for the exits, terrify the most hardcore metal heads and make Green Day sound as threatening as Tom Jones. This is exactly what a modern punk rock band should be doing. 

---Benjamin Boles
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And here's an older on from our show in Danbury last fall that was just sent to me:: Women who run with wolves.

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"Noise cannot be imagined as a synonym for dissonance , even if the judgement of noise by the then-surprised publics is imposed on modernist dissonance.. Dissonance works through it's rethinking of consonance , and composers using it tended to think of their work as reinvigorating the western tradition of music."
-Paul Hegarty:: Noise/Music: A History