Where Is My Mind?

     If the American Gothic movement had a sound, Chelsea Wolfe perfectly captures it.            Wolfe’s latest album (and sixth overall), Birth of Violence , brings her back to her gloomy folk roots. It’s a goth-tinged acoustic album, a departure from her harder, heavier and sludgy doom-metal heard in her previous releases, Abyss and Hiss Spun , two albums that followed the more accessible Pain is Beauty , whose title sounds like an art school kid’s expressionist project.      Acoustic offerings are nothing new for Wolfe. Her catalogue features a few here and there, and Unknown Rooms: A Collection of Acoustic Songs is as stated: a collection of acoustic songs from her earlier days.      Acoustic music has a tendency to be skipped over, but Wolfe’s should not. No matter how they’re performed, they are desolate, raw and impassioned. If her studio recordings can move you to the deepest bowels of a dark place, they are a whole other entity live with even more depth.    

     This past Wednesday, Texas metal ragers Portrayal of Guilt and Portland sad-rockers Soft Kill released an explosive split through Closed Casket Activities, and man, I’m all for it.      To start things off, Portrayal of Guilt’s song “Sacrificial Rite” is a blistering, vicious, brutal two-minute assault, just like in typical hardcore fashion. It’ll have you punching walls and banging your head on tables, and despite its short length, it has a beautiful dynamic that oddly carries you into the next song, Soft Kill’s ethereal “Tin Foil Drop”.      Soft Kill, dubbed by vocalist/guitarist Toby Grave as a “sad-rock” band (moody shit for all the goths out there), further expand on the descriptor with a spacey, shoegaze-y, atmospheric six-minute track that will leave you in tears. It carries bit of synth-pop and Disintegration-era Cure elements to it. It’s a melancholic, moving track that contrasts Portrayal of Guilt’s opener, but in essence, both tracks feature the same