Wolves In The Throne Room
Celestial Lineage

After a beautiful first album, a masterful and wonderful second one (that 'Two Hunters' which introduced them to the world, not just the metalheads!), a third work a bit murky and risky in wanting to taint the sound perhaps too much, considerably affecting the more experimental, environmental, and atmospheric side (a considerable factor, since it made them so unique to attentive ears), the third chapter of the forest saga arrives (the first was precisely that 'Two Hunters' I mentioned earlier, leaving out the first real album "Diadem Of 12 Stars"), and as expected, surprises are not lacking, rather they multiply exponentially, past intuitions are reinterpreted through a key of ambient psychedelia that has never been so prominent, with keyboard usage amped beyond all expectations, yet coloring the canvas even more, making it marvelously iridescent. Celestial Lineage, it's useless to deny it with false hypocrisies of a hardened scribbler intent on shooting down everything and everyone, is that masterpiece we expected from them, the last piece of a sonic and harmonic journey that has garnered quite a few devotees since its steps were imprinted in the damp and stagnant soil of the darkest and most impenetrable forest, and in the hearts of us ordinary mortals.

Celestial Lineage bears the weight of a sound that now transcends categorization, approaching sensory divination with moments of catharsis, release, and sacredness difficult to emulate. The duo that composes them, blood brothers, the Weaver brothers to be exact, fortunately put aside the depiction of immense anger, somewhat, to be honest, monotonous from the previous platter, to resume the discourse right where the second masterpiece album closed, stuffing everything with a stylistic and artistic maturity here at the highest levels, and with sounds even more expansive and projected towards the infinite cosmic space that overhangs us: church-like chants, sacredness, blurred images, panicked dances, folklores imbued with psychedelias taken from certain Kraut-rock (as stated by the parties involved, the main influences for this new work were sought in historic and fantastic groups like Popol-Vuh, and it shows!), black metal soaked in the cold and damp winter nights of Nordic countrysides, lost among immense stretches of land and mud. Think of a Burzum, intent on playing the Emperor of "Anthem to the Welkin at Dusk," with the immortal lesson of bands like the masterful Dead can Dance, the aforementioned Popol-Vuh, with a dash of cosmic music à la Tangerine Dream; nice picture, no? Well, Wolves in the Throne Room go even further, pushing forward, bringing their personality to a masterful level, infusing everything with strange, tentacular, gray, melancholy magic, which captures and fills the soul with autumnal colors as few other works have done lately, and it places itself straight among the most beautiful albums of the new millennium, those that will be remembered, those that will be told again, listened to again, and once more adored.

Of course, it is by no means a simple work (the colors presented here are so many that they cannot be appreciated with casual and fragmented listening, but rather with attentive listening, perhaps with headphones, by the light of a faint candle flame), but I strongly recommend everyone to listen to this work of art.

The world needs them, music needs them, the air itself needs their vibrations, and I indulge it, indulge my soul and the air around me by pressing play again, restarting the journey: this wonderful journey that starts from the heart to expand into the entire universe.