Wolves in the Throne Room
Celestial Lineage

I look out the window. The colors painting on the walls of the houses drip from a sky that melts as the clock hands move forward, consuming what remains of an afternoon I'd rather forget. Now. But it's too soon; even negative feelings should be observed for a while, viewed with the different lenses offered by an unsettling old man, an abstract optician, who occasionally peeks through the rain-streaked glass. I open the cabinet that holds them, pass them one by one, feel what they communicate to me, and calmly savor the sentimental echo they grant me. Then I find the right one. It’s gray, opaque, blackened, but with luminescent edges. Inscribed on it is a name, Wolves In The Throne Room, and below a title, Celestial Lineage. I put my eye to it to see.

The first landscape that appears is an eternal echo clawing up from the woods with feral talons, "Thuja Magus Imperium" is a hundred-year-old photograph without colors, only impressions. The bells call to mind little chimes, and a synth settles in the air to carry Jessika Kenney’s voice (an associate of Eyvind Kang, already present on Two Hunters) among the trees. Her ethereal steps are echoed by the guitar shortly after, like two distant voices that, unable to touch, imitate each other until the arrival of the fire, the overwhelming entry of the black metal machine that shreds the image into a thousand pieces. It crescendos in pure desperation; while the rhythm is extremely tight, the guitar sketches melodious (epic) Icarian flights until it opens into a post-rock sea, intensities diluted in long, melancholic notes.

"Subterranean Initiation" is a rust-encrusted locomotive racing between ferocious blast beats and icy guitars, the voice reminiscent of the genre's primal hatred, sublime openings on synthesizers enveloping in cold. The (double) bass drum is continuous and relentless even as the rest softens the tones, until the decomposition of the rhythm into noise segments, guitar feedback, unsettling electronics, and a broken groove devour the ears and create a bridge to a magnificent finale. The chorus-imbued six-string towers over a sound sky laden with misfortune. The acidic counterpoints in feedback and percussion supporting the choir of spectral mass in "Woodland Cathedral" grip the nerves and elevate the emotional charge even further; it's an exceedingly slow procession that makes its way through the mind, monstrous folk that hypnotizes. From the sky, sickly stars rain down, dripping with cold blood, "Astral Blood" blends back and forth dynamics, sustained mid-tempos, and a fantastic interlude of ancient folk lost in memory.

The lens cracks, a fracture runs through it, and it remains in my hand. I look out the window again. There is no more light. The hands have stopped moving, and it’s even colder in the room, a symptom that what I just witnessed has had the right effect.