A distorted electric guitar swoons the listener — a riff so familiar, yet arranged with unexpected turns. The crash of the drums fills the spaces. You are transported into a dimly lit room, where the air is thick, where the colour of midnight streaks through the window.
The Arizonian artist Mike Masser returns after four years with his album 5. Its opening track, Wolves in the Whiskey, feels like an awakening in the dark, ghastly room.
The Devil sits at the bottom of my glass Grinning wide as I sip it back
The lyrics of Wolves in the Whiskey suggest something haunting, a kind of internal conflict. The symbolism of the wolf adds another layer to Masser’s soul-bearing track. Conventionally, wolves are hunters, sinking their fangs into what they catch and tearing it apart. Yet we forget that wolves are also instinctive, with survival tactics that make them agents of chaos. They carry strong social bonds too. There is a grief bound up in this symbolism, as Masser reveals when he speaks of his father’s Alzheimer’s. The Wolf in the Whiskey takes on a hallucinatory quality, as though the wolf, having clawed its way through survival, finally turns to a numbing haze for release.
Masser’s music carries the clear influences of Ozzy Osbourne, Black Sabbath and Metallica. Wolves in the Whiskey also echoes the low-rock grit of Morphine’s Fur Bikini, with its distorted two-string slide bass.
The track brims with grit, yet shows a refined understanding of hard rock, layered with stomach-churning lyrics that chart the dark, painful journey Masser finds himself on.
