When the fires burn / and the ashes rise / as the children stare / with their blood-red eyes… Not exactly a cheerful message from Hot Guts and their retinue, and while part of me feels they’d of had more of a righteous charge in the 80s, when a lot of their influences were out and about, they’re sufficiently steamed; they’ve obviously had a rough go of it. I’m not sure why they’re angry, but I respect it, the question being: Do they effectively channel their rage into their music? I’m happy to say Wilds serves as an apt microcosm of madness (not the ‘he’s crazy!’ kind but the ‘if you keep pushing him, he’s going to kill you!’ kind), constructing semi-Utopian cold-synth caves that are surprisingly comfortable to crawl into. I wrote about these guys in Signal To Noise mag years ago and barely recognized them this time around. The core Guts of their being remains as tortured as it ever was, they’ve just found a more electronic/digital way to express that angst. Not sure why but the track I’m connecting to most effortlessly is “A Kindness,” a cut you won’t hear unless you sit and listen to this LP front-to-back (people still do that, right?). It’s a bleak landscape, barren and frosty, populated by two lost voices, male and female, whose calm moods soon are broken up by dreamy beats, distant, blurred sirens, and the most provocative synth swipes of the record. As the apparatus decays more and more foreign elements enter the fray and muddy the signal beautifully, and just as quickly as it began, Wilds is done. I’ve gone about this all backward, of course. Don’t miss the strangely vulnerable permutations and jubilant chorus of “Will Carry,” or the upbeat playfulness of “Kite and Shadow.” Another head-slam from AVANT!, another nice reveal care of Cerberus, no?
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