In a 2009 Show No Mercy interview with Olympia "astral black metal" band Wolves in the Throne Room, I mentioned that, as a byproduct of their relative success outside of the underground, they'd inevitably be on the receiving end of plenty of scenester backlash. (Black metal can be a strange place: at times, it's more acceptable to remain boring and unknown than be ambitious and heard.) A couple of years later, United States black metal in general is at an interesting point. The scene, or lack thereof, is something I've been going on about for the last few years; now, on the backs of crossover "experimental black metal" acts like Krallice and Liturgy, it's nudging into even more mainstream corners. And this time, there's more at stake than the ire of a 16-year-old Darkthrone fan.
Sure, there are longtime USBM diehards like Inquisition, Absu, and Averse Sefira, groups who've been there for decades, and who will keep releasing strong albums without showing up on your non-metal friend's iPod. That said, even three years ago, nobody would've expected Liturgy to share the stage with Dirty Projectors at a New Yorker festival. (Or, earlier this year, to play MoMA on their own merits, and not as part of a Banks Violette black metal-themed installation.) There will always be an underground, but these days, once you are outside of it, the opportunities are bigger. More important than scene cred and these crossovers, though, is the fact that American black-metal bands-- no longer the punchline of Scandinavian lifers-- are making truly staggering music.
Wolves in the Throne Room sit somewhere between the crossovers and the kvlt. Since forming in 2004, brothers Aaron and Nathan Weaver (and the occasional rotating bandmate) have tied early-90s Northern European sounds (especially Burzum and Ulver) and the progressive reach of San Francisco forebears Weakling to the Pacific Northwest, pushing the genre into new places without sacrificing its core. (Outspoken environmentalists, they live on a self-sufficient farm in Washington state.) To the chagrin of many of the band's later fans, they followed their biggest moment, 2007's Two Hunters, with 2009's Black Cascade, a collection of less-penetrable, 10-plus minute, stripped back, droning, unrelenting time-stretchers. Despite the running time, it was a pure, concise collection-- the sound that remains after the last log turns to ash in your campfire. Celestial Lineage, on the other hand, gains power via accumulation. (Press materials reference Popul Vuh, the Grateful Dead, Neurosis, and "Theosophists, beatniks… the back-to-the-land movement, satanic hippies, tree-spiking anarchist punks.") It takes the blisteringly insistent, gorgeously rousing, hypnotic repetitions on Black Cascade and jams them back into the more sylvan earlier records, 2006's Diadem of 12 Stars and the aforementioned Two Hunters.
Where the past two albums each had four songs of longer duration, Celestial gives us seven, spacing out the mammoths with briefer interludes. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who first surfaced on Two Hunters and has also worked with Sunn O))), Sun City Girls, Asva, and Mamiffer, sings on three tracks. Former Isis howler (and current Mamiffer member) Aaron Turner contributes atmospheric chanting of the two-minute "Permanent Changes in Consciousness". "Rainbow Illness" introduces noisy synth washes, and the dramatic, goth-liturgical chimes of the female-fronted, six-minute "Woodland Cathedral", feels like a continuation of Two Hunter's "Dea Artio".
It probably is. Wolves in the Throne Room consider Celestial Lineage the last installment in a trilogy that started with Two Hunters, and perhaps their last album as a band (at least in its current form)-- this is the climactic, colossal finale. In that regard, the epic, more metallic outpourings are the best they've done. We've posted the ethereal, harsh, 12-minute opener "Thuja Magus Imperium", with its psychedelic guitar freakouts, chiming bells, female choirs, field recordings, endless guitar/synth sustain, buzzing shoegaze, and monster dynamics. The seven-minute "Subterranean Initiation", in turn, spirals into infinity, layering in keyboards that come off like a celestial choir amid the frantic drums and levitating guitars. They locate a harsher, more earthly feel on "Astral Blood", a song with an anthemic, post-punk vibe that surfaces after a windy, gently pastoral acoustic interlude. The 11-minute closing track, "Prayer of Transformation", works as a synth-entwinted instrumental for 5 minutes before Weaver screams: "Lay your corpse upon a nest of oak leaves/ Wrapped in a star shroud repent your flesh/ A shadow child dissolves/ Meditate in a den of skins and straight poles... A vessel awaits built from owl feathers and moss," among other things. It's rare for a black-metal song to choke you up.
Despite being relative latecomers to the game, and even though they're fucking with the template more than purists would like, Celestial Lineage feels like the contemporary American scene's defining statement after San Francisco group Weakling's seminal 2000 offering Dead As Dreams. Since their early days, Wolves have grown assured, but haven't overstepped. The sound is enormous, but remains organic (at times, you can almost hear leaves rustling). It's true black metal creating its own rules, and a testament to the band that it can tweak something this much and still sound like it's sticking to the script. That said, though it's not the purest version, it's also not the most eccentric. In some ways Celestial feels like a throwback when compared to the claustrophobic experimentation of some of Leviathan's headier pieces or the genre-shifting hyper-speed "occult metal" of contemporary Absu. Thing is, though, unlike a lot of that other stuff, it also feels like a classic.
