Wolves In The Throne Room

they should choose to release better music. then i might go see them live. (j/k, i'd never see them live.)

i just got two hunters and malevolent grain and i'm kind of blown away by them. i understand why serious metal dudes might not dig it, because the fact that a metal dilettante like me loves it almost certainly means it's too hybridized and prettified and whatever. but to me it sounds like someone's nailed the 4AD-metal that a lot of people have been edging toward for years. really wanna see them live.

I saw them last week! They were great as usual, creating that distinctive musical illusion of a furiously paced beat going at a glacial pace. And yeah, I think part of their appeal to me might be that they are crossover material. Haven't heard the new EP yet, new album is now on sale I think.

i have two hunters. i rarely listen to it, but when i do it's always rewarding. i really like the premise of the rawness of black metal being an expression for nature and its physical energy.

new album is now on sale I think.

yeah i downloaded that too, haven't listened yet.

Black Cascade has grown on me to the point where I now think it's better than Two Hunters and as good as Diadem.

im still not sure about black cascade. i was expecting there to be more of the droney freak out stuff from malevolant grain but its played much straighter, even more so than two hunters.

They have a good, evocative name.

Yes indeed, always makes me think of Steve Bull getting his MBE from the Queen.

Anyhow, looking forward to hearing the new one.

their name finally makes good on all those years of lesser "wolf" bands.

its played much straighter

that's my initial impression of black cascade too. on first go-round i like two hunters better, but i'm new to all of it so i need to give it more time to sink in (or wash over me, as the case may be). good band, though.

i saw them last year, opening for Nachtmystium. They were great, better set than Nachtystium's (and indeed, quite a few of the metal horde left after Wolves stopped playing.) One of the best shows I saw last year. I knew about the EP, but had no idea a new full-length was coming out ... nice!

the full length is far more brutal than the ep.

so after some more times through i really like the toughness of black cascade. if you take it as a package with malevolent grain, it's like the raging id to the EP's superego. or something.

Brutal is good...

they're playing with krallice next month, i'm gonna try to go.

they are playing here on sunday

kind of digging the long droney stretches on black cascade

saw them tonight, they were HUGE and good. so much sound. (krallice opened, they were awright.)

maybe i was too close??? idk

totally wanted to love them and just didnt

i wanted to love them and did. completely enveloping. i would've stayed for a second set.

they're playing austin in a couple weeks maybe i'll give them another try

completely enveloping is otm. how close were you??

i was toward back of the room, but it's a very small room (the studio at webster hall). then for the last song or so i moved up into the middle.

i also had several margaritas and beers before the show. probably helped with the immersion.

see i feel like i was 10 feet away

I should probably give them a go if they tour the UK. I've been a bit underwhelmed by the records, but there don't seem to be many bands doing this kind of BM live, and I can believe it's a whole different experience. Particularly if they play in the woods.

i was probably 15 feet away and i thought it was perfect.

Bummed that I missed them on the UK tour at the start of the year. They were due to play down here the day all the snow hit the country. Don't know if the gig went ahead or not, but I'd like to think that they ended up stranded out on the moors somewhere, playing a gig in a snow cave to an audience of black metal badgers.

Didn't even know they were coming - I hope I'm not about to find out about Darkspace touching down in the UK after the event!

the contrast between wolves and krallice was interesting, because it's not like krallice was quiet or anything, and they worked up some good hammering grooves, but wolves' sound was just so much vaster.

(and i know the headliner always gets to play louder. but it wasn't just a matter of volume in the decibel sense, it was volume in the dimensional filling-the-room sense.)

i loved both of them - Krallice was def noodlier tho?

maybe i am just experiencing anti 6 string bass player bias

krallice def noodlier, yeah. although somewhat less than on the album (partly because a lot of the noodling got buried in fuzz). the noodliness gets a bit much for me on record, even though dude is no doubt a guitar hero.

krallice when i saw them played three songs, one of which was probably about 20 minutes long. so yeah, there was noodling.

they're playing austin in a couple weeks maybe i'll give them another try

BIG HOOS I will go to this with you.

(and i know the headliner always gets to play louder. but it wasn't just a matter of volume in the decibel sense, it was volume in the dimensional filling-the-room sense.)

― would you ask tom petty that? (tipsy mothra), Wednesday, May 27, 2009 5:23 PM (3 hours ago)

definitely true that they were the loudest thing i saw all night

and yeah dude lemme check the finances but i'm pretty sure i'm down for that

xp

I mean I guess my issue was that I kept waiting on the blast beats or howls or something resembling a guitar riff but instead it was just this wash of earcrushing sad static. Not that I have a problem with that as a matter of course, but it just wasn't really what I expected or wanted. As it stood I kept going "is that the drums? are there beats somewhere behind the squall?"

maybe the mix wasnt great? the seperation was great when i saw them (admittedly, the club they were at is by far the best venue in town as far as sound goes)

Hmm I bet every one of these shows sounded better than the time I saw them in a bowling alley in 2004.

Wow that sounded pompous and wasn't meant to.

hahahahahaha

ok its official i'm goin next sunday

u down ilxor moniker man or

I always hear this band name to the tune of Adolescents' "Kids of the Black Hole"
Also, I love these guys

hoos i feel strong positive about your next exposure to these guys

seeing them saturday night. two-hour drive to the middle of nowhere, which seems appropriate.

Every time I see this thread title, I sing it (in my head) to the tune of "Thieves in the Temple."

xpost: "just this wash of earcrushing sad static."

My kind of BM action - I definitely have to seem them live.

Just picked up Black Cascade on vinyl (Southern Lord do a great package!). Seems a lot straighter than Diadem of Twelve Stars (the only other WITTR album I have), if that's the right word. I'm not sure yet whether that's a good thing.

it is, the ep before it had stuff more like the last album.
It is great though!

Initial reaction is good -- the problem to my ears is that, if it's too straight it can quickly descend into goth-ness à la Nephilim (if you know what I mean), which is a bad thing. The first track especially had some slower guitar riffs that got me worried.

agree 100% with everyone who said the drummer is the star of Wolves in the Throne Room, but also love the extended passages when the drummer takes a break and it's just flanged fast double-picking.

I've never made it all the way to the end of Black Cascade!

I must say the intensity of the drumming is one of the things I noticed on Black Cascade (in comparison with Diadem). Seems higher in the mix, much more of a driving force.

Could you say why you didn't care for Diadem, Alan?

actually, I agree. I listened to two hunters again the other night, and yeah, the drums do sound better on black cascade. mixed higher, more powerful. on two hunters, they seem to get overwhelmed by the rest of the mix at times.

as for diadem, it's been a few years since I listened, so I may just be talking out of my ass... but I just felt like the songwriting wasn't there yet. like they felt like they wanted to make a whole album of epics but weren't quite sure how to go about it. so, instead of length serving to sustain/prolong a tense and driving atmosphere, building intensity all the while, what we get is a bunch of riffs pasted together.

I'm not even entirely against that approach. just didn't work for me on diadem. but again, it's been a while. I might be off.

and I listened to black cascade again. I really have no problem with a band repeating riffs. I love when maiden and thin lizzy do that that as well. love bands like circle and loop too. but imo, many of the riffs on black cascade don't bear repeating endlessly. many just sound like bog standard black metal mush to my ears. so overall, I like bits here-and-there but lose interest over the course of four looooong tracks.

Just played Black Cascade (which I initially quite enjoyed) back to back with Arckanum "ÞÞÞÞÞÞÞÞÞÞÞ", both drums-driven records where the black-metal-trance groove is the main but not sole foundation, both shamanic/nature themed bands, etc - and the comparison does not do WITTR any favours at all. It's not just the songwriting, I kept flicking back and forth between tracks from both albums and everything, the vocals, drums, guitars - just sound weaker and flatter.

Personally, I'd like to see the band really take a long time to craft the next album. It feels to me (and I have a lot of personal insight here--been close friends with WITTR for many years), that they are always rushed to finish their compositions in the studio. They would do themselves a big favor if they composed something and demoed it a few times before going in to record a final product.

I think they've more than proved themselves on stage by now.

wow, really liking the arckanum so far. have only heard the split w/svartsyn. will have to dig deeper.

that arckanum album is really, really great.

agreed on wanting to hear a more polished WITTR record too. I'll concede that the guitars on black cascade may have been more memorable if they didn't sound so murky.

still haven't seen them live! want to but it just doesn't work out.

ok its official i'm goin next sunday

― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Wednesday, May 27, 2009 10:04 PM (1 year ago)

u down ilxor moniker man or

― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Wednesday, May 27, 2009 10:04 PM (1 year ago)

Figures I would just now see this, huh?

dudes were killing it last night

excited to see them tonight. the new stuff is killer

this is my favorite BM band name. In fact it's up there for band names overall for me.

saw them at a show at a punk house in an abandoned church a few days ago, didnt know it was just 2 guys playin guitars. they were good obv

huh you must have seen an ad hoc lineup, usually there is a seriously raging drummer. I think him and the other founding guitarist are brothers?

oh, there was a drummer

haha. yeah I saw them the other night in new york with Thou and Krallice. all bands were good. THOU really surprised me. but Wolves were by far the best. such a great live show. they played the bell house and it sounded fucking amazing imo. I definitely recommend seeing them live. Yeah its 2 brothers and a raging drummer. And it was great.

saw them last night. liked em but it was super, super hot and packed with sweaty people and found it a little hard to get in the right frame of mind.

new material sounded... a lot like the old material? I found it tough to distinguish since I'm not overly familiar with their back-catalog but it all seemed of a piece. but this was a live show and I'm looking forward to digesting the new material with a closer listen once the new album drops.

feel like these guys do the atmospheric BM thing very well, the drummer is def excellent and gives everything a nice sense of momentum, etc, etc. but if they could just throw in an honest to goodness RIFF once in a while, it would make a world of difference.

they throw in a lot of new/different shit on the new one, although I suspect it's not terribly conducive to being played live and so maybe isn't emphasised much

oh, nice. early buzz definitely has excited for it!

hm so

i've been reading up on & watching docus about the cascadia free state blockade and the eco-defense movement in the cascadian mtns more generally, the ELF and Earth First and all that, and then i remembered that these guys are purportedly "cascadian black metal" so i thought i'd try Celestial Lineage since I hadn't really given them a listen since Two Hunters.

i ~get it~ now. like, i was into them before, but now that i've got a better sense of what the region is like, i can totally hear it in the music. i can put on "thuja magus imperium" and close my eyes and see those 400 year old trees with some dude sitting up on a branch watching the sun rise over the mountain amid the snowfall.

really an interesting window into the new record. almost makes me think of agalloch.

*cascade mountains

you nailed it, part of why I like this band so much is because I am down with their philosophy and sense of place.

also hoos if you have any questions abt Cascadia stuff or need free copies of Pickaxe or whatever you should message me on ILX.

Thoughts on their new ambient-synth album? It doesn't seem that big a leap to me. Same chord progressions, different settings.

I like the drone and drag of it. But obviously not for everyone.

(I guess "Sleeping Golden Storm" is a Leonard Cohen nod? Not musically that I can tell, but he'd probably sound good croaking over it.)

Really like the new one, but it's my first exposure to them, so i'm not very representative. great band name, though

Listening to it for the first time now. I'm curious how it sounds to someone who's never listened to Tangerine Dream's Zeit, or any of a bunch of other early 70s synth-prog albums that are the root of this sound. I feel like having steeped myself in that stuff for so many years now, I'm kind of incapable of judging this record on its own merits.

I've heard Tangerine Dream and I know that stuff is the explicit reference point for this album, but I am certainly not steeped in it. So I hear this album more in the context of WITTR, and it makes sense in that context too. Compositionally, it's not that much of a departure -- you could arrange the songs with walls of guitar and blast-beats, and it would sound a lot like other Wolves albums.

Anyway, I like it. I'd be interested to see how they incorporate it into live sets.

Celestite has taken me by surprise, there's some really magical parts in there.

I'm feeling emo tonight and "Cleansing" from Two Hunters is really soothing.......

I still feel like the most recent two are my favs tho. was a bit surprised at some of the lukewarm reaction to Thrice Woven as I feel like melodically speaking they really expanded their sound (at least on the opening track).

"Dia Artio" is such a great ambient track too.

I guess I really enjoy black metal centered around the Pacific Northwest wilderness as an omnipresent spirit. Like I think when American black metal sucked is when it tried too much to be Norwegian black metal instead of drawing on what made that work (the regional cultural infusion into the music).

feel like this shoulda been the soundtrack to The Revenant

no doubt, i've felt like I had ropes around my chest due to stress all day, and Celestial Lineage completely sucked it out.

I forgot how dense this album is.

Ah, now Wolverhampton Wanderers makes sense.

Lol

every time this thread hits SNA it takes me a moment