Chelsea Wolfe
The Grime And The Glow

THE REVIEW

What I've been listening to and consuming for quite some time now is the true debut of the beautiful and talented Chelsea Wolfe, a songwriter with an apocalyptic style who immediately brings a different image from many other female songwriters from the album cover alone.

Not explicitly feminine like PJ Harvey or Anna Calvi, Chelsea is sensual in a sadder, darker, and less fashionable way.

Not politicized like Patti Smith, Chelsea nonetheless captures certain less commercial nuances in her singing and certain crooning, aiming to describe pseudo-religious visions.

Not cold like Nico, yet apathetic.

Chelsea is a fascinating shapeshifter, who seems to want to stay true to the animalistic nature of her surname, recording with a Tascam her first work halfway between hyper-electrified lo-fi blues and post-apocalyptic declamations filtered through a perspective and approach to sound exquisitely Lynchian in the use of vocal reverb and in the themes addressed... song titles like "Cousins Of The Antichrist" certainly don't suggest sensual or delicate atmospheres, and indeed the melody is sly, the production is splendid for its lack of means, the primordial version of the beautiful "Moses" (which will be refined on the next album, considered by most critics as the true debut) has a drum programmed with really "cheap" samples, but for this reason precious.

A debut that bewitched me and that, like the disturbing figure on the cover, guides you along roads full of inhospitability and solitude, where these songs resonate, very brief in many cases (13 tracks for a total of 46 minutes), and that often hurt willingly.

This is who Chelsea Wolfe reminds me of, it's useless for the radical-chic yuppies hipsters & company to compare her to PJ Harvey.

Chelsea Wolfe seems like Michael Gira in his own demos and the early albums of Angels Of Light, with the same concerning and concerned gaze towards the future.

Lately she has refined herself a lot, but I would hope for a return to similar sounds... albums like these are so rare that every time one emerges, I'm stunned.