1. Dea Artio
2. Vastness and Sorrow
3. Cleansing
4. I Will Lay Down My Bones Among the Rocks and the Roots
I wanted to write about something that was, more or less, the opposite of Joanna Newsom.
Originally I was going to write this post on Burzum. I had about two paragraphs of the review written before I realized that it’s impossible to write about Burzum without giving a complete overview of early black metal, and that you can’t really understand the mindsets of the people involved without listening to their music, and that listening to the music without some sort of introduction would be pretty difficult for those uninitiated with it to begin with, so I was stuck in a circular loop of having a million things I wanted to say and no way to start. For now I figured I might was well write about black metal that doesn’t have such a convoluted history to it and that wasn’t made by a misanthropic, outspokenly racist and nationalist-socialist, Tolkein and Dungeons and Dragons obsessed 20 year old who was, by age 21, a convicted murderer and arsonist. I’ll save that for another time.
Wolves in the Throne Room are an important band for me, personally. Their first album, Diadem of 12 Stars (which is, quite frankly, too good for me to write about right now other than a recommendation that you listen to it as soon as possible), was the first black metal album I ever really listened to. You may say “so what,” you may have an impression of black metal as terrible music that’s laughably over-the-top, you may not even know what black metal is. I’ll gear this towards the less informed camp. Black metal is, more or less, as the name implies, a darker, heavier (and, simultaneously, more ambient), more brooding variety of metal, more focused on atmosphere and emotion than on speed and technical prowess. It’s also responsible for expanding my musical horizons beyond metal.
In high school, the first half especially, I listened almost exclusively to metal. It was definitely my favorite genre of music, and I was fairly indiscriminate. If it was “real metal,” I liked it. I had the usual disdain for metalcore that most metal purists get. I went to the first two Gigantours. I loved progressive metal, power metal, thrash metal, death metal, etc. If anyone mentioned they liked metal, I would get almost aggressive with them, trying to see if they were a “true” fan or if they just liked a couple odd bands or, heaven forbid, something like Slipknot. I was an elitist, in most senses of the word.
I found out about Wolves in the Throne Room on a Southern Lord sampler CD I got with a SunnO))) album (a band that I didn’t really even begin to appreciate until well past that point). I was blown away by what was, at the time, something I had never heard anything like before. I was fine with heavy guitars, but the droning wall-of-sound quality was something I’d only ever really encountered before on the SunnO))) album that I didn’t really even enjoy so much as purchase for the novelty of having something so heavy and inaccessible. Yet here was that same tone, perhaps with a muddier distortion on it, playing something that was actually melodic. Buried beneath the static, there was something almost elegant and beautiful about it, in a way that I didn’t expect music that heavy to be.
From there I got on a serious black metal kick and explored all sorts of different bands in the genre. From that short transitionary period, I branched out to music that followed what I saw as the spirit of what I liked in black metal, but in a variety of different genres, thus ending my years of metal elitism.
So there’s my personal backstory to all this. Needless to say, I bought this album the week it was released. What surprised me about it immediately was the notable post-rock influence, starting with the beginning track which is all synth pads and ethereal female vocals. There’s definitely a much more atmospheric touch to this album and to the structure of the songs in general than on their previous release. This isn’t a new things in the genre by any means, atmospheric black metal is a well-established sub-genre, but this went even beyond the glowing ambient wall of sound guitars of the first Wolves in the Throne Room album (and bands like Weakling that heavily influenced their sound) and bordered at times on a style that was decidedly not metal at all. That wasn’t much of a surprise to me either, since by this time I had collected almost the entire Opeth discography and was used to music that merged metal with softer passages, but this (to me) was the closest thing to a missing link you could get between metal and shoegaze. The melody is slow and beautiful and entrancing, the details in the texture. The texture here was a bit harsher, for the most part, than shoegaze, but the artistic philosophy behind it was still there.
It’s crushing, immense, and all-encompassing. It improves with volume in a way that most music doesn’t, bringing out the intricacies of the texture itself and improving the hypnotic quality of the music until it surrounds you and you can’t help but be moved by it. It’s a monolith of sound that engulfs you, building slowly but still demanding attention.
If you’ve read my review of RTZ, this isn’t like that. It evokes a lot of the same emotions, but you don’t need to invest yourself in the music to enjoy it, or listen to it in a fundamentally different way. You just need to let go and let it overtake you.
Which might be hard, because it’s rather abrasive at first blush. Like I said, the music is heavy and dark. The vocals aren’t particularly prominent in the mix, and they’re pretty sparse here, but they’re mostly shrieks and yelps. If you’re not particularly fond of that sort of thing, and you aren’t curious enough to see how it can be in any way ambient or emotionally investing, this probably isn’t for you. I would say you’re missing out on some great music, but if you can’t appreciate it, you can’t.
But if you are curious (and I’m sure that you are), it’s worth a shot. The lyrics are all but unintelligible unless you listen to this kind of music a lot, but there’s a surprising amount of emotional depth behind them. The finale of the album, the end of I Will Lay Down My Bones Among the Rocks and Roots, is so powerful that I almost get weak-kneed listening to it. A lot of it is the music and the crescendo of the song as a whole, but the emotional energy is unbelievable. It’s a cathartic, almost primal thing to hear such raw emotion play out in such a beautiful way.
If you already like metal, sorry for not addressing you. It’s just that I don’t really need to sell it to you to get you to listen.
I can’t think of any ways to describe it that won’t end in cliches. All I can do is offer that, even if you don’t like metal, even if you don’t like harsh vocals, you could still like this. Because the appeal in it isn’t speed or monstrous riffs or anything like that, it’s in a simplistic beauty, strongly expressed. The delivery may be a bit unconventional by some standards (though certainly not particularly unusual by black metal standards), but the result is something that – at times – is incredibly emotionally gripping.
I say at times because this is not a flawless album. The lighter synth sections seem to go on a bit too long, and despite the album’s length, there isn’t really a whole lot of meat to it. The songs aren’t particularly complex, and while they do have a hypnotic element to them, it would be nice to hear something a bit more dynamic. What you basically have here is three introductory tracks leading up to the far-and-away superior final track, which combines elements of all three quite nicely into one refreshingly dynamic song.
This album’s relative accessibility has also led to quite a few unnecessarily rave reviews of it by people who aren’t at all familiar with black metal. It’s good, but it isn’t particularly original, and the influences of other bands are clear. This album is a bit of a darling to the “indie” crowd, being another genre they can cross off on their list of music they enjoy in their quest of having the most diverse musical tastes as possible.
But what other people say about it doesn’t change its quality. Neither does my praise. You just need to listen to it and see for yourself. I’m uploading the final track because, as I said, it’s a good summary of the rest of the album, and it’s the best and most dynamic song on it. It’s a bit of a long listen, just past 18 minutes, but the finale of it is, as I said before, absolutely amazing, as long as you let yourself get absorbed by it. It’s the sort of moment in music I crave and can rarely find. It is absolutely crucial that you wear headphones for this.
I Will Lay Down My Bones Among the Rocks and Roots
