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Dec 16, 2013 Issue #48 - November/December 2013 - HAIM By JR Moores

There is an awful lot to like about this band. Its members have chosen a great band name (just don’t type it into Google Images too soon after breakfast). They have great pulpy, B-movie artwork (a giant alien millipede eviscerating an astronaut). They have great song titles (“Everyone I Hate Should Be Killed,” “Autopsy Turvy,” “Welcome to the Spaceship, Motherfucker”). If you can understand what frontman Zack Weil is screaming about, they probably have great lyrics too.

Aside from the odd sludgier moment, Oozing Wound plays a frantic, punkish, riff-heavy brand of snotty thrash, with nothing so pifflingly compromising as a chorus or so cringingly onanistic as a guitar solo. However, there is a kind of metallic je ne sais quoi that elevates Oozing Wound above your average grinding maniacs with a smirk-inducing moniker. After all, they must be doing something right (or wrong?) to get themselves signed to the esteemed and eclectic Thrill Jockey label. It might be the higher-pitched scream that Weil employs in place of the bowel-wobbling guttural bellow that many metal vocalists rely on. It’s a little more palatable, a little wryer, less excessively masculine. And for all the band’s claims to be interested in only “loud fucking guitars and screaming and shit,” there is an underlying delicacy to Oozing Wound’s palate, as evidenced by the astonishing “New York Bands”: halfway through, it collapses into immersive white-noise feedback and then a beautifully scuzzy cacophonous noise-jam.

If Liturgy is the pretentious philosophy student of Thrill Jockey’s metal fraternity, prancing around campus in a beret quoting Nietzsche to all and sundry, then Oozing Wound is its cartoon-scribbling dropout. No less intelligent, but a hell of a lot more fun at a party. (www.oozingwound.bandcamp.com)

Author rating: 7.5/10