•
Rating:
And here we are again, with the computer on, the Word document open, waiting for some letters to fill its empty white spaces, and on loop, for a full week now, the new album by the all-American Wolves in the Throne Room, which I have been eagerly anticipating for confirmation or equally for a refutation of their real capabilities after the masterpiece "Two Hunters".
"Black Cascade," that's the name of this other gigantic work, positions itself on even higher levels than its predecessor by smoothing out the dry corners of emotion and filling them with truly breathtaking atmospheric crescendos and an even more psychedelic, rarefied, powerful attitude, and if we must use this term: epic. As usual, it is composed of "only" four tracks for a total of 50 minutes filled to the brim with contaminated black metal yet at the same time pure in describing natural and "Nordic" landscapes.
We mentioned four tracks, four very long tracks (the average is over 10 minutes per track), which settle as the highest point black metal, if we can still call it that, has known in recent years; four tracks where a bit of everything happens, where the aforementioned genre is accompanied by psychedelia, doom, folk, dark wave, ambient, and post-rock (in the continuous emotional ups and downs and in some harmonic structures that reminded me not a little of Godspeed You! Black Emperor), where singularity lies entirely in an attitude that is anything but extreme, attracting the ears of people not used to such sounds, coming from listens as distant from each other as possible.
I could very well do a track-by-track, but this is a work where this method of analysis becomes very difficult and does not lend itself well to the real purpose of the music contained therein, which presents itself as a blend of wide-ranging and, as mentioned, epic and emotional sounds where the interplay of parts is entrusted entirely to the spatial and cosmic exaggeration that such music exposes (very close to the early Ulver in terms of this attitude, their own way of interpreting black metal, based not on satanic scenarios as per tradition but on natural exaltations full of charm).
The Wolves come out with yet another masterpiece that will garner as many positive opinions as possible due to the charm and warmth it manages to emanate track after track, riff after riff, atmosphere after atmosphere.
The confirmation I was looking for, nothing more to add.
Loading comments slowly
