Wolves In The Throne Room – Celestial Lineage (Southern Lord)
Winston Churchill once quipped: “You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something at some point in your life.” And while the rancor that a band like Wolves In The Throne Room elicits from their genre's orthodoxy might not necessarily constitute enmity in the sense that Churchill meant it, the sentiment isn't far removed. Much of black metal's history is predicated upon the establishment of an us/them dichotomy that would ostensibly place the musicians and their devotees apart from the society's conventions. It sometimes seems like a ludicrous world the genre creates for itself, one of garish face paint and syncretic confabulations of Tolkien, Lavey, and/or Hitler, but a great number of its adherents treat it with a deadly serious gravity. So when a band like Wolves In The Throne Room begins to attract a fan base who may not have heard Bathory or Beherit, many purists cry foul. It's not a new phenomenon within the genre – on one hand, Cradle Of Filth were ostracized for bringing cleaner production and stadium-level live performances to the genre, on the other, newer bands like Liturgy are largely lambasted for co-opting certain facets of black metal's aesthetic (most notably their elevation of the style's convoluted, pretentious, and wholly self-serious philosophical musings to a level of finely-tuned bullshit artistry) without a proper pedigree or reverence towards their forebears.
What Wolves In The Throne Room actually stand for is a bit more nebulous, and is often defined more by their supporters and detractors than the band members themselves. Their ecological inclinations are often the first element mentioned – both in pleasant surprise by people who might otherwise be put off by the preponderance of juvenile Satanism and shock-value fascism within the genre, and in righteous indignation by those who see the band's beliefs as trappings of some sort of politically correct agenda that they would consider at odds with whatever central tenets around which black metal is supposed to revolve. Neither conception is really diminished by the fact that the band's core lives on a communal farm in Washington state, leading to all manner of speculation that the members are Luddites, hippies, New Age spiritualists, or adherents of some lifestyle not generally associated with the style. The music itself, often reliant on hazy ambient washes, eerie field recordings, and a sense of blurry, almost shoegazey, melodicism, is on one hand a welcome outlier for those uninterested in the thousands upon thousands of black metal albums that sound exactly alike, and on the other an unforgivable affront to the genre's strictly-imposed standards of aesthetic purity. The band tries to disavow these puritanical ideas as much as possible. Theirs are belief systems grounded in individual experience rather than agendas to be imposed on a larger populace, lifestyles that make allowances for the modern world without fully giving way to its trappings, and music that refuses – for better or worse – aesthetic stasis.
Much to the continued chagrin of their critics, Celestial Lineage is easily the band's most accessible work. While this isn't the first of their albums to begin with hushed synthesizer drone and operatic female vocals, rarely has it been as well-employed. Opener “Thuja Magus Imperium” starts out with just such a lead-in, one that wouldn't have seemed out of place on any of their previous albums. But where the newest distinguishes itself is its ability to transition between extremes of quiet and loud, slow and fast, dissonant and consonant, with far more grace than in the past. Whereas there were ethereal elements to previous releases, they often tended to either explode into blastbeats or fizzle out completely. Here there is a waxing and waning, where the gentler melodies that often introduce songs or transition between them tend to build more gradually, adding layers of aggressive material that reflect the initial melodies to an extent the band had rarely previously explored.
What may prove also surprising to anybody familiar with the band's previous work are two elements that might seem unimportant at first glance. First, Celestial Lineage is the single example of the band's albums that features more than four tracks. Second, only two of the songs present exceed ten minutes in length. It may seem like a trivial concern, but the number and length of the songs helps indicate the direction taken by the band. The two shortest of these songs, “Permanent Changes In Consciousness” and “Rainbow Illness,” don't crack the two-minute mark, and stand out more drastically than anything Wolves In The Throne Room have previously undertaken, through a combination of the unexpected and the overused. Both rely on analog synthesizer drones not unlike early Tangerine Dream or Popul Vuh, which in an of themselves aren't unheard of on the band's albums, but here are largely stripped of adornment. There is some hint of the nature recordings of which black metal bands have been enamored since the days of Ulver and Arcturus, but whether Wolves In The Throne Room's use of these elements leans more toward cliché or the sonic reinforcement of the band's ecological ideals depends on how charitable a listener's inclinations.
The rest of the album holds surprises in store as well, both positive and negative. “Woodland Cathedral” focuses on ethereal female vocals and spacey guitar, a combination that neither launches into full-on metal nor dwells on the minimalism of the album's shorter songs. The two longest compositions bookend the record and do an excellent job of incorporating wide stylistic variation, never a strong suit for a group with a long history of riding good ideas until they don't seem that great anymore. The only unpleasant surprise comes with “Subterranean Initiation.” A listener may not expect such a relatively short song (only 7 minutes – barely anything for this band) to fall into the same traps as the band's more repetitive material, but it doesn't really go anywhere or do much. There's a quiet break in the middle, but it sounds less like an element of contrast than it does the band running out of steam.
As far as their much-trumpeted personal philosophies regarding man's place in the natural world, the listener is given the same amount of information as on previous releases, which is to say not very much at all. It's a philosophy defined by innuendo and vague clues - song titles certainly hint at a relatively cohesive belief system, and the band themselves express their viewpoints pretty clearly in interviews, but none of it is clearly connected to the music itself, leading the band to an awkward position. They could start printing lyrics and fully explicating their cosmology, but they would risk turning an open-ended project into a didactic soapbox, a move that could easily alienate many of their supporters. Conversely, leaving their ideology rendered in hints and suggestions fails to assign a cohesive structure to the beliefs, one that could help people understand their arcane credos and could conceivably help affect some of the change that they believe the world is so sorely lacking.
Ultimately, the people who loved previous Wolves In The Throne Room albums will likely feel the same way regarding Celestial Lineage – and understandably so. The album takes many of the best elements put forth by the band over the years and distills them to a more digestible essence, arranged more cohesively and proficiently than ever before. Those who hated the band are also unlikely to have their minds changed by the newest release, though I'll venture that if exactly the same album had been produced by a pudgy virgin in a worn-out Mayhem shirt thumbing a well-worn copy of Mein Kampf in his parent's basement, the more restrictive-minded fans of the genre would embrace it with open arms. It's this sort of selectivity that led to the inbreeding of Europe's royalty over the past centuries, and the same elitism that produced Charles II of Spain's inability to chew a mouthful of food has also been responsible for some fairly abysmal black metal, through a desperate race to the bottom in the name of dedication to some idea of higher purity. Like them or not, Wolves In The Throne Room has shown a willingness to embrace a wide variety of concepts, both aesthetic and philosophical, that help to push the genre into less familiar territories. It can be uncomfortable for those who like to claim black metal as some secret society, but it was never really something that was supposed to be comfortable in the first place.
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Wolves In The Throne Room perform at Strange Matter on September 17th with Megaton Leviathan, Bastard Sapling, Ilsa, and Argonauts.