ACL Live Shot: Reignwolf

That’s Reignwolf, while he jerks around the stage alone, stumbling and stomping (by John Anderson)

What’s that shrieking howl shredding through the early afternoon heat at Zilker Park like some rough beast slouching towards Austin? That’s Reignwolf, the scrawny 29-year-old Canadian Jordan Cook who decimated the Austin Ventures stage, grinning like a demon behind his streaks of sweaty hair and shaggy sideburns.

That’s Reignwolf, burying blues deep under the destruction of “Electric Love” while he jerks around the stage alone, stumbling and stomping to the drum kit as if disoriented by his own cacophony; working the frets with one hand as he pounds the skins and cymbals with the other.

That’s Reignwolf, lighting up “In the Dark” before being joined by bass and drums in a three-headed Cerberus of crazed thrusts against his flint-struck wails, his seared riffs blurring into a catastrophe of axed climax that never seems to let up even as he sits on the edge of the stage for “Mandolin Song” and scars his instrument like a sawed-off shotgun packed with bludgeoning buckshot.

That’s Reignwolf, wrapping himself around Fleetwood Mac’s “The Chain” as if it shackled him to some other world, thrashing and possessed. His voice rises as a lonely warped yelp that torques the song into bursts of uncanny startling blisters.

That’s Reignwolf, rhetorically capping the 40-minute onslaught with “Are You Satisfied,” the only song he’s actually recorded and has for sale, flinging the microphone across the stage and gnashing the song in the maw of sharpened chords.

That’s Reignwolf.