Caught on KUSF: Wildildilfe's Helter-Skelter Mood Mash

Call me old-fashioned, but one of my favorite ways of discovering music is still through the radio. It reminds me of being a kid, staying up late waiting for some catchy new song to come on Portland's pop station so I could record it with my crappy pink tape player. These days, that radio dial has morphed into an Internet stream, but I'm still old-school in my allegiance to my hometown station, and I mine the intrepidly eccentric KUSF daily for bits of songwriting gold.

My latest KUSF discovery that I'm going pretty nuts over is San Francisco's Wildildlife — a Technicolored batch of the Pixies, Butthole Surfers, Circle, and Sleep fried in industrial grease. More to the point, Wildildlife's "Feed" yanked me inside its warped suction. The track, placed on daily KUSF rotation, starts with a tweaked beacon of feedback echoing ominously across distant cymbal clinks. One minute and twenty seconds in, though, the percussion has gobbled steroids and the feedback loops don psychedelic armor. Foreboding vocals languish inside murky white noise. The song, like the rest of Wildildlife's debut full-length album, Six, is a helter-skelter mood mash — insistent guitar riffs pump your adrenaline, while the doomy rhythm section and howling humans suggest malicious intent. Unusual noisemakers give the tracks both demented pop hooks and an irreverent demeanor: "Whooping Church" involves the sounds of blowing into glass bottles and the eerily buzzing "whoop" of plastic bags catching on fire. And I mentioned the Pixies because Six' "Things Will Grow," launches with similarly spiky guitars popping off around Wildildlife's gruff group vocals and leftfield "la la" chorus. The 13-minute "Nervous Buzzing" lives up to its name, finishing off Six with the build of electronic drone, vocal distortion, and drums, like a giant mutant taking the stairs two and three at a time. The song sinks into bleak industrial turmoil before emerging in triumphant colors, a symphony of guitar solos quieting into a single melody line.

What the hell is this record? It's metal and meditative ("Magic Jordan"), post-punk and tribal, and whacked sonic pranksterism crushed into seven incredibly dense songs. It's songwriting gold that has hit #1 on two KUSF charts — local and loud — a couple of times, and has been in the station's top 30 for weeks. It's the kind of music that would've been too creepy for that pink tape recorder when I was a kid. But to the grownup me, Six sounds like the perfect amalgam of anxiety and excitement, confused by heavy doses of sludge, screams, and misbehaving electronics.

Sadly, just because you discover a band fairly early on doesn't mean you're not already too late. When I finally tracked down Wildildlife's Andy Crane, Matthew Rogers, and Willy Milz amid an East Coast tour, they told me they're moving to Seattle. The three friends moved out here from Boston in 2006, and after putting out a couple self-released CD-Rs and playing gigs at bus shows and Thrillhouse Records, they're headed north as a band. I'm sad to see them go before I had a chance to even catch them live — although they plan to hit town again this summer — but they've left to San Francisco a propulsive batch of manic-expressive rock. And anyone who wants a taste just has to keep an ear to KUSF for Wildildlife's "Feed" — or, in another old-fashioned method of expressing fandom, hit the indie record stores in town and pick up a copy of Six for yourself.