Wolves In The Throne Room

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