Whether making black metal under the name Altar of Plagues or electronic music as WIFE, multi-instrumentalist/producer James Kelly has consistently asserted himself as an artist who forges his own path. With both projects, Kelly has actually worked within established genre boundaries, but he’s also introduced unorthodox touches that place his work in a category by itself. His take on black metal, for example, captures the primal savagery of early pioneers like Darkthrone and Emperor while simultaneously drawing from a much broader emotional and musical palette.
In a rare best-of-both-worlds scenario, Altar of Plagues has managed to convey Kelly’s love for classic black metal and still exude a sense of freedom to explore goth, shoegaze, and—perhaps most crucially—a sensitive disposition that even the most high-minded black metal auteurs still tend to avoid. If Kelly’s recent shift away from Altar of Plagues’ blast-furnace tonality shocked any of his fanbase, it really shouldn't have. By that point, his penchant for tasteful subversion was well established.
WIFE’s 2014 debut full length What’s Between consisted of lacy electronic music draped around a singer-songwriter frame. Even more drastically, Kelly wore his R&B/soul vocal influences on his sleeve. But when you strip away the surface distinctions, What’s Between is cut from the same moodiness as all of James’ previous work. The new WIFE EP Standard Nature is arguably James’ most truly shocking move to date, not so much because he’s shifted stylistically again, but because this time his music sounds downright joyful in spots.
The differences between Standard Nature and What’s Between jump out within seconds. Opening instrumental “Wide Nine” establishes the beat-driven format that Kelly sticks to throughout the EP’s five songs. But again, Kelly makes his left-of-center approach clear almost as quickly. “Wide Nine,” for example, starts out as if it’s going to sustain its initial club-bound direction and even suggests that it might turn into a dance number. It doesn’t, the beat melting by the 1-minute mark into a hollowed-out scaffolding of its own shape, the remainder of the song playing almost like the morning-after memory of a night of revelry.
Moreover, while each of the five songs abounds with jaw-rattling drops, Kelly shows his versatility by underlaying the rhythmic boom with an array of disparate elements. On second track “Standard Nature,” for instance, Kelly sings in a style that recalls a church choir performing hymns on a high holiday. And on “Lovelock,” Kelly uses a vocoder to channel his inner Tobacco. Meanwhile, “Glass Interruption” features strings that eventually swallow the song’s glitchy first half, only to be swallowed in turn.
On “Native Trade,” Kelly takes soft keyboard swells—the kind we often hear in heartstring-tugging film scores—and scoops them out with intervals of silence, so that the tune stutters while evoking puffy clouds of drama. As always, Kelly weaves different shades of solemnity into a rich meshwork. And as time goes on, Kelly’s music gets more and more refined, so that it evades simple descriptors like “somber” and “dark.” But, where Kelly has utilized myriad shades of gray up to this point, on Standard Nature he expands beyond gray tones and demonstrates a rare ability to make overcast music that bursts with color.
At this point, we can probably bet that Kelly will change his approach again next time. Which means that Standard Nature’s pleasures are likely to be fleeting—like the songs themselves, a suggestion of an idea that’s over before it gets a chance to fully develop. But if nothing else, as Kelly’s body of work has shown, his need for constant evolution is one of his defining characteristics. On Standard Nature, he stays true to that and leaves enticing hints of more twists and turns to come.
