Wolves In The Throne Room - Celestial

[Eyehatehippies]

Wolves In The Throne Room – Celestial Lineage

Reviewed By Nyx Nightshade



Oregon's seminal post-ambient Pantheists have unleashed their new album, Celestial Lineage, to the black metal masses.  As usual, the group has a lot to say about the album, but also as expected, the release lives up to the hype.  Right off the bat, you'll see that this is the obvious successor to Two Hunters, with a heavy focus once again on not only atmosphere, but dynamics, and long periods of near formless ambience arising from minimalism.  However, when things get heavy, they crush galaxies with the same weight that we found on 2009?s The Black Cascade.  However, while Two Hunters sounded like a band that had found the scent of its pray, The Black Cascade was the band's catharsis, a physical manifestation of the dark intensity and energetic immediacy that their live shows are well known for.  With that obstacle tackled, Wolves In The Throne Room are free to make an album like Celestial Lineage, which represents the third album in the band's trilogy, and it nicely closes up some of the thematic questions that they'd raised on the previous two albums, if we're able to listen closely and recognize these conclusions.  Like any conclusion to a trilogy that has come before, this album also opens up new doors, new possibilities, and new directions for the band to explore.



Randall Dunn has once again handled the production admirably.  The sound this time around  is warm, but it's sharp.  It has teeth, and it shows them when it wants to.  It's a little less full than The Black Cascade, there's a little more breathing room in the mix, but this just enhances the feeling of spectral swords lurking behind every wounded tree in the band's spiritual universe.  The performances are tight and emotive, particularly the vocals, which benefit significantly from the contributions of Jessika Kenney and Isis's Aaron Turner.  Kenney had contributed on prior albums, but her vocals are more present and seamless on this release.  On the track "Woodland Cathedral", her expressive voice juxtaposed with the icy chords of distorted guitars proves a heartbreaking combination.



The songs themselves stretch out, ebbing and flowing from track to track, which gives the illusion that the album is just one long, strange exploration of a dark universe, hidden within our own nature, and the nature around us.  Many of the soundscapes are unique to themselves, and yet we find them recognizable; there is a form within them.  The stellar sense of melody that has permeated past Wolves In The Throne Room releases also is found herein, and helps to carry the album from track to track, but also to differentiate the tracks as the melodic themes fade from one into another.



Ultimately, what are these three albums by one of America's predominant black metal bands trying to tell us?  Is it a lesson, that if we develop a general philosophy of existence, a personal belief system, and carry it out mindfully within our daily reality, and then bring it with us aesthetically into our creations, this process will eventually reveal spiritual truths?  If that's what the band has set out to do, they make a good argument for it, as they are definitely on their way to becoming something different and new, and yet fully tangible and within the human experience.  They're certainly out there, but at the same time, they are just another one of us.

http://www.crawlingchaoscollective.com/?p=183