Chelsea Wolfe Births Violence

     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.


     Birth of Violence has an exceptional elegance to it. It features minimalist, tender brushed percussion, sweeping string arrangements, incorporeal piano notes, chiming guitars, and her characteristic midrange vocals all hauntingly weaved together that paint a type of Pagan/Satanic canvas, or at the very least pull you through a bleak and seemingly endless void of the heart. If it sounds too discomforting, it really isn’t; simply, Wolfe has beautifully perfected her craft over the years, and Birth of Violence is proof. Sometimes gloom is more comforting.

     “The Mother Road” opens the album in her signature might – a nuanced intensity that grips you without letting up over the course of the album’s 44 minutes. It could very well be a feminist tune when she sings the lines “I'm old enough to know some pain, and I'm hell bent on loving you, women know what it is to endure” and “Guess I needed someone to break me, guess I needed someone to shake me out, it was you, bloom and eclipse them, wake up and transform”. Feminist anthem or other, it echoes a ghost of a tormented past.


     Following “The Mother Road”, “American Darkness” is classic Wolfe: a skittering trip-hop rhythm attached to disembodied piano chords and scraped guitar strings. Here, the album’s mood is further intensified. It is unrelenting and unknowing, almost like an underlying emotion waiting for its moment to explode.


     “Deranged for Rock & Roll” is a little more “rock”. It’s got a propulsive groove to it and it’s a bit of a countering curveball to the album. It breaks up the flow of the songs up to that point, but effectively strengthens the rest. The absolute highlight, “Highway”, is a culmination of all Birth of Violence has to offer. Wolfe’s artistry and otherworldly voice really shines here.

      Birth of Violence may alienate some casual listeners, and Wolfe is a “refined taste” type. That’s not putting her in an exclusionary sense; simply, her music commands you to really reach in and let go. Emotionally, it’s her more intense and best yet. It’s quiet, and sometimes subtleness works in grand ways. It’s a masterfully composed album, and along with long-time collaborator Ben Chisholm, the musicianship will only keep building and building. Wolfe’s music appeals to the goth, metal, folk/country and psychedelic crowds, and everyone else in between, and is always washed with a brooding darkness.


     Birth of Violence opens a new path that will place Wolfe even higher up the ranks with her counterparts, musically and literary. It is the soundtrack to the novel that’s never been written, and the sound to a key movement in American culture needing musical accompaniment.