On her sixth official full-length album Hiss Spun, singer-songwriter Chelsea Wolfe attempts to find reconciliation with global-scale suffering by turning to her own personal scars in a heaving wail of guitars. Over her last two albums, 2013’s Pain is Beauty and 2015’s Abyss, Wolfe and her right-hand multi-instrumentalist Ben Chisholm steadily dialed-up the heaviness, first by transplanting Wolfe’s gothic folk approach onto an electronic/industrial bedrock and then by adding shades of doom. For Hiss Spun, their first outing with Converge guitarist/producer Kurt Ballou at the boards, Wolfe and Chisholm dive headfirst into sludge metal.
Wolfe is, of course, hardly the first musician to express a sense of being overwhelmed, or to employ forceful sounds as a buffer. And with Ballou onboard, Hiss Spun abrades more than her past work. But much like the last BIG|BRAVE album pushed beyond the soft/harsh dichotomy, Chisholm, Ballou, and Wolfe carve out a space where ear-pleasing sweetness can be heavy. They also leave ample room for Wolfe’s voice, which never fights against the crushing weight of the sounds around it. Ditto for Chisholm’s noise collages, presumably the “hiss” of the title and one of the album’s most distinguishing features. (Fittingly, Chisholm re-worked sounds from both the band’s personal space and historical sources like the Enola Gay’s bomb blasts.) It also helps that much of the riffing comes courtesy of Troy Van Leeuwen whose unparalleled finesse has graced Queens of the Stone Age, Failure, and A Perfect Circle.
Wolfe explains in the Hiss Spun press release that she “wanted to write some sort of escapist music, songs that were just about being in your body, and getting free.” Throughout the album, she keeps her lens trained on the body, even as she gradually widens her scope from painful intimate contact to mass tragedies like war and ecological ruin. On “Vex” and “The Culling,” for example, Wolfe uses the phrase “bled out.” Neither song is entirely clear about what or who their protagonists struggle against, but the image of blood subtly connotes something different in each song. On other songs like “Particle Flux,” “Offering,” and “Static Hum,” ravaged landscapes are hard to tell apart from individual trauma.
All throughout, proximity and intimacy—with one’s own thoughts and memories, with people who cause injury, the lingering presence of a lost “twin”—is always uncomfortable. “I’ve spent, in different beds/Many moons/And that’s the way I prefer it,” Wolfe sings over a low simmer of downtempo metal on “16 Psyche.” She continues: “I feel it crawl up my legs/Let me wrap you in these thighs/It gets me out of my head again.” Wolfe is a particularly melodious singer, which doesn’t clash with the music so much as it makes the turmoil that inspired it sneak up on you. In some spots, it never seems to materialize at all.
As much as Wolfe broods, the songs don’t illuminate her pain all that much. The people and travails she sings about dwell in the periphery of the music like flickering shadows. Heavy music has long been the province of people who find catharsis in confronting demons. Wolfe, Chisholm, Ballou, and their guests take a more indirect path. The sound they make is certainly foreboding, but one can also walk away from this album feeling more settled than disturbed. Being grounded, after all, is what Wolfe was going for. That you have to work in order to appreciate what she went through to get there is what makes Hiss Spun so intriguing.
