The Haunt, Brighton, Wed 19th April
Looking back at what I wrote after first seeing Chelsea Wolfe, at the Mutations
festival, I find I was much taken by her music. While taking some
exception to her Gothy, too-much-mascara look.
Which in retrospect
seems too much like reviewing a book by the shade of it's cover.
True, I tend to react to the trappings of Goth the way they do to
sunlight. The main problem with it is that too often it's just
the dressing up, just empty theatrics and painted dark. But then your
actual dark is plentiful enough with Wolfe. (Quite literally so. It's
one of the most underlit gigs I've been to in recent years.) Enough
to convince you she's yer actual creature of the night.
There's a cool quote from her on Wikipedia: “"I do have a hard time sticking to one
genre, and honestly I prefer it that way. I'd rather be free to
experiment and make the kind of art I want to make than be easy to
define." It the goes on to list her influences as “doom metal,
drone metal, black metal, gothic rock, folk and dark ambient”.
Bar
folk, none of which are sounds which you associate with songwriting,
yet she seems continually able to pack them into songs. In fact, by
'folk' I suspect people mean that packing - the means by which she binds those
sounds together - rather than any kind of Sandy Denny vibe. (Though at
the same time it can sometimes sound like later, louder Portishead.
Wolfe's tremulous voice in particular can channel Beth Gibbons.)
Guitar lines can be distorted to the
point where there's really only the distortion.
Yet their scrunchy metallic rhythms don't collide with melodies so
much as co-exist. Songs don't progress so much as deepen, like storm
clouds thickening. And the sound is so expansive it's great to hear
in a live setting.
If I say there's something underlyingly
adolescent about it all, I mean it in a positive sense. In the sense
of feeling that immensities are contained within you, which you're
compelled to find a way to release. And in our nostalgist, classic
rock magazine era, we probably need to cling on to the sense that
it's music about stopping you getting old and accepting.
An old-ish clip but a track from the
current album... (And like I say, underlit.)
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