In a world ridden with plague, what could be more timely than black metal? And in a world facing impending climate catastrophe, what could be more timely that deep ecology? And in a world regulated by time, what could be more timely than timelessness?
Fortunately, there’s a band who do all three. And a new album by Wolves In The Throne Room is just the kind of uplifting darkness we, as a species, need.
I must admit, on looking at the track listing to Primordial Arcana, I felt a little trepidation, and not in a cool spooky way. The songs all looked WAY too short, a million miles away from their earlier, Godspeed-esque mammoth epics. How to trap all that atmosphere and build into a mere five minutes? What are they doing, angling for a jukebox musical? Though not gonna lie, I’d watch the shit out of that, and I hate musicals.
But I needn’t have worried. Opener “Mountain Magick” (just out of interest, did you know Japanese terror cult Aum Shinrikyo / Aum Supreme Truth were originally called Aum Association Of Mountain Wizards?) shows they’ve lost none of their intensity, being all blast beats, riffing and an uncharacteristically clean guitar solo. By track two, “Spirit of Lightning”, it’s apparent that they’ve lost none of their mojo. Backgrounded keyboards and that trademark harmonised shredding, along with an ethereal choir, combine to create something every bit as powerful as they’ve ever been, even featuring various movements and changes of pace, albeit shorter ones than in days gone by.Because for me, WITTR are all about that atmosphere. That simultaneous deep time feeling of being both rooted in the Earth and utterly cosmic. In this way, they increasingly remind me of a black metal equivalent to Fields Of The Nephilim’s prog-goth masterpiece Elizium, musically warm but implying the coldness of ancient rock, of empty space. By the time the synth horns kick in on “Through Eternal Fields”, Nathan Weaver’s eldritch (with a small “e”… and probably a fair bit of weed) vocal sounds like it’s out on a wild wet and windy night (with apologies to NMA), a true rider on the storm.
But enough of this weather-related tomfoolery, what about the riffs? Oh yeah, they’ve got those too. “Primal Chasm” begins with a pretty classic metal riff, before suddenly ascending and diversifying into a truly awesome (in the Biblical sense) cacophony, a vastness of noise that resolves, Godspeed-like, into a nicely hypnotic holding pattern around which swirls the infinite ethereal. “Underworld Aurora” begins with crows, presumably feasting on something unspeakable, then gently and ominously eases the listener into what I, appropriately enough, tend to think of as “throne room music”, all bombast and chimes. Then in come the wolves. It’s a track that, in itself, does a decent stab of encapsulating one of those old-skool WITTR epics, but with their newer sound, shifting from onslaught to reflection and back again like most people do verses and choruses. Neurosis are probably a good reference point here, with the achingly beautiful lead riff riding over the harsh brutality of the rhythm section like glorious despair at the apocalypse.But the album’s true epic is “Masters Of Rain And Storm”, which, well, kinda does what it says on the tin. WITTR have always seemed to be best described by their song title of old, “I Will Lay Down My Bones Among the Rocks and Roots”, but Primordial Arcana sees them shift their focus a little higher, into the atmosphere, where the extreme weather happens. And “Masters Of Rain and Storm” does this more than any other track.
A full-on slice of black metal (complete with opening “HUH” on the vocals), a stormfront-solid chugger of a main riff gives way to insanely catchy choral synths until finally the storm breaks and we get everything at once, Nathan snarling, growling and shrieking his way from inside the blackest of thunderclouds before we reach the eye of the storm, an almost neofolk (but, y’know, not fascist) interlude that paves the way for the lads to properly rock out at the end, which they do with a balls-out rush to the finish line. Where Mayhem and Darkthrone conjure atmosphere from a punky minimalism, WITTR offer the wide-screen experience. IMAX even.Once the storm has passed over, we are left with something reminiscent of Angelo Badalamenti’s score for Mulholland Drive, or Vangelis’s for Blade Runner, but with a dirtier, more mediaeval feel, as the album gradually descends from the sky as a cleansing rain to feed a mountain stream.
So yeah, my earlier trepidation about the length of the tracks was basically bollocks. Primordial Arcana is about as WITTR as it gets.
-Justin Farrington-
