Music Review :
Wolves In The Throne Room – Celestite
(2014)
This companion piece to Celestial
Lineage, the near-masterpiece from these Washington state black metallers
stating that they are not playing black metal but are obviously inspired by Ulver and Burzum’s decadent yet beautiful mastery challenge of BM while
saying their biggest influence is Neurosis.
Living on a farm and praising a return to organic form and life, the members of
WITTR have recorded two of the best American black metal records to date; the
aforementioned Celestial Lineage and Two Hunters.
Their recent release is an instrumental exploration of
esoteric textures and sonorities that reminds of interesting interludes in Burzum
and Ulver’s most notorious albums. An entire opus solely concentrated on
ambiance and musical odyssey is pretty ballsy. With all the ambition that WITTR
enters in this territory, an artist like M83 would have killed it. But here,
WITTR misses the mark and should have released this album under another name
just to separate the band from the experimentalists. Just like Sunn O))), who
explores many alleys with other musicians they sign with their co-artists.
WITTR did an okay job with a difficult task. It feels like a challenge the wolf
could not chew by himself. Maybe a collab with a more experimented drone/noise
music artist could have helped them raise the bar.
With Initiation at
Neudeg Alm, there are glimpses of hope and a nice sound that opens the
mystery angle that black metal and instrumental music share. It doesn’t need to
be raised to epic scales.
Celestite is not a
complete disaster but don’t get into this and wait for black metal or even
metal. It is interesting for fans of the band to follow this new direction but
it could have been more transitional or even a part of a double album with Celestial Lineage more than a piece of
itself. Sometimes an artist has to get it out of his system to continue its
evolution and get to stronger levels. Let’s hope it was the case here. Because
Wolves In The Throne Room still has many promising records in the belly.
6.5
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