the USA is a Monster
Wohaw
Load Records
I’m sure there are plenty of reviewers out there who believe in detachment, who believe in standing back from music as you’d stand back from a painting in a gallery: Avoid putting emotion or enthusiasm into the forms that you write about. Just offer the facts, the criticisms, the strengths, the weaknesses. You must always present yourself as impartial, removed. And in the final picture, you are always better than the art itself because you a critic. Others simply make art but you must assign its value and weight.
My goal as a music writer is to reject this worldview. Music will always be a superior medium to rock journalism and its expressions will inevitably be more meaningful than anything I can offer you. Given this unmistakable fact, in the end, critics must either be charlatans—pretenders and professionals claiming that their own perspective is more wondrous than the things they might perceive—or zealots—complete and utter lunatics who pour their hearts out about recorded sound because they cannot do otherwise. As I’ve never made a profit off a single word I’ve written over the years, as I’ve barely received any recognition for my work, and as I would be entirely satisfied if these conditions never changed, I will proudly say that I am a fucking zealot and that what you are apprehending right now is just love-struck raving.
Periodically, I lose sight of all this and continue here somewhat out of habit—the bands blur together, the descriptive phrases begin to sound canned or get stuck halfway between my brain and the keyboard. Sometimes I need to stop for a bit, and when I stop it usually takes something massive and profound to remind me of why I started this mess to begin with. Time goes by, I listen to some records and then out of nowhere a new album comes in that just blows me apart and I’m back again, gushing and enthusiastic as always!
I can’t imagine a better wake-up call than Wohaw, the newest release by the noise-rocker/singer-songwriter duo the USA is a Monster. Epic in composition and intent, Wohaw is a motherfucking thunderstorm of deeply political sonic fire and definitely one of the best gall-danged releases to come out this year.
Rekindling and refining some of the stylistic schizophrenia of their previous outing Tasheyana Compost, Wohaw harnesses the band’s massive lexicon towards the creation of a remarkably cohesive and keenly honed opus. The USA is a Monster has always stood on pretty unique sonic and esoteric grounds, but on this sprawling record the band has truly succeeded in marrying their typical ear-shattering drum/guitar/keyboard noise-fare with quiet acoustic ballads, water sounds, pop melodies, hair metal screaming, and even a semi-spoken word intermezzo. Clocking in at almost an hour and fifteen minutes, Wohaw is equal parts battle cry, celebration, eulogy, and meditation—an evocation of sacred worlds, worlds destroyed, and destroyers that must be cast away. The screamed lyrics of the track, “All The Worlds Leaders Must Die” plainly spell out the band’s general artistic/political position against the track’s backdrop of Lightning Bolt-esque riff/drum punctuations: “The world’s leaders do not have / the best intentions in regard to / the survival of the planet / and the majority of the human species… / All the world’s leaders must die…!”
There’s no doubt that hearing sweeping insurrectionary cries like these embedded in torrents of devastating rock and roll warms my soul but slightly more problematic for me is the band’s persistent identification with American Indians, with whom the band—as far as I’m aware—has no long-standing cultural or familial connections. The US government and its European colonial antecedents have royally fucked over the native peoples living here for centuries and I’m obviously not against popularizing indigenous struggles against genocide, however I would say it’s a tricky business to approach this shit from the outside without projecting yourself onto the lives of those you’re supposedly championing.
At points Wohaw seems to overly idealize American Indian society along lines eerily reminiscent of the old romantic image of the noble savage—an illusion of “uncivilized” native peoples uncorrupted by social hierarchy or internal division. At other points, the USA is a Monster seems to recklessly appropriate native traditions as their own, naively placing themselves outside of the oppressive social structures that have marginalized and continue to marginalize indigenous peoples in North America and across the world.
What makes all of this forgiveable to me, is that every now and then they really do seem to come at their difficult subject matter perfectly, such as in their epic telling of the story of the warrior Tecumseh or in their account of “George Catlin And The Mandan Chief.” The latter tale is especially important because in the USA is a Monster’s telling of this story—about an artist seeking to render an image of a Mandan chief and through his painting taking away a living part of him—they seem to perhaps recognize some of the tremendous dangers and sensitivities of the project in which they themselves are engaged, noting of their visual artist “a man who can make a living person by staring at them could perhaps destroy this life in the same way.”
And all politics aside, it is a rare and beautiful thing to find an album like Wohaw that so vividly demonstrates a band pushing themselves to their full creative limit. In musical-historical terms, Wohaw should sit right alongside Lightning Bolt’s Wonderful Rainbow as a part of a generation of markedly maturing noise-rock releases. This record should make it clear to anyone interested in this type of music that this is truly a great time to be alive and feverishly listening to recorded sounds. Absolutely fucking incredible!
