Wolves In The Throne Room

The only song I really like a lot on Black Cascade is the last track. I doubt I'll be putting it on any best-of lists this year... definitely kind of a yawn compared to Two Hunters.

Pitchfork really slammed it. I was shocked.

pitchfork dont have a clue

they should just have Brandon Stosuy write all of their metal reviews imo.

btw, my favorite thing about this band is drumming. very much the foundation of their sound. tranced-out, heavy, driving. (much like filosofem.)
― picture me lolin' (Alan N), Monday, 21 September 2009 22:57 (Yesterday)

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?

they should just have Brandon StosuyDrew Daniel write all of their metal reviews imo.

― A polar bear you can see in a snowstorm (rockapads), Tuesday, September 22, 2009 4:05 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

^^ fixed

Alan is contrary!

Diadem is great but it is so derivative of Weakling. The other two albums are much more the evolved WITTR sound.

they should just have Brandon StosuyDrew Daniel write all of their metal reviews imo.

― A polar bear you can see in a snowstorm (rockapads), Tuesday, September 22, 2009 4:05 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

With mad respect to Drew Daniel Cosmo Lee is the man for this imo

i like all three of those dudes actually. i read invisible oranges on a fairly regular basis. didn't even realize he wrote for p-fork. ok all three of those dudes, but nobody else!

Respect to Brandon Stosuy too, obv!

It's great that pFork has those guys. They are responsible for some really thoughtful metal criticism on a site where you'd never expect it.

Going way back, but I am ready to hear some new stuff from Indian.

me too. Indian are terrific.

Better than ever as a 5 piece. The guy who builds Emperor cabinets is running their visuals and ultra-modded analog synth from the sound board.

I think I like Diadem the best, followed by Black Cascade and, last, Two Hunters. Why? As I wrote on a different thread, one of my favorite things about traditional metal is how the end of a song is just a killer hook repeated over and over again (examples: Thin Lizzy's Roisin Dubh and Iron Maiden's Hallowed Be Thy Name). Norwegian black metal seemed to skip the song to immediately start at the outro (prime example: the Transilvanian Hunger album). This brings me in a trance lake state, which I love. If it was up to me, it would last forever. Unfortunately the average black metal song doesn't last long. Enter Diadem by WITTR. Derived from Weakling for sure, but as Weakling didn't care to exploit their sound into a vast collection of music, more power to WITTR (someone has to do it!). Bonus points for making their songs very varied within the given genre boundaries and for making the drums almost the most important voice within the music. Two Hunters was a whole different beast. Way more shoegaze than metal, way more more drone than buzz. I liked it, in the name of progress. But it could never top what Diadem did for me. The Malevolent Grain EP was an interesting release, as it showed a band at crossroads. The title song progressed from the Two Hunters sound and added the dreamy esoteric female voice from the shoegaze genre; it didn't do much to me. The second song was a ferocious return to the Diadem form. A style the band opted to continue on Black Cascade, mixing it to a certain extent with the ambient drone of Hunters; so that it isn't a carbon copy of Diadem and, therefore, a disappointment. I'm willing to admit that the songs and hooks on Black Cascade are a tad less memorable than what came before. But it is still one hell of a ride.

for me it's the opposite. On Two Hunters seemed like the band was focused on telling an epic story. Instead of losing myself to the repetition (which I also love to do), I got lost in the dreamlike ebb and flow of Two Hunters. I didn't really think of it like 'goth/shoegaze there', 'depressive black metal there', until after I had heard the album a million times and read a bunch of articles about it. The last song on Two Hunters is what holds the whole thing together for me. The final battle. That stomping beat as two enemies meet, is some transcendent shit. The second song on Malevolent Grain and the last song on Black Cascade are also huge favorites of mine. These guys finish albums very well.

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.