by Oliver on February 12, 2024 in Album
The title goes in circles around itself, but it does Chelsea Wolfe concludes with her seventh studio album She Reaches Out to She Reaches Out to She not just a good bit Abyss and Hiss Spun but also ventures further than ever into the darkest abysses of trip hop with Dave Sitek.
What a sensational job he did TV on The Radio-Man in the producer’s chair delivers (more correctly: how fantastically his captivating, powerful and fascinatingly mysterious attention to detail in electronic realms combines with the aesthetics and songwriting of Chelsea Wolfe as well as their congenial colleagues Ben Chisholm, Bryan Tulao and Jess Gowrie to create an atmospheric intensity that is unparalleled), can be seen in the outstanding opener that sets the path for the record Whispers in the Echo Chamber hardly hide. Wolfe’s otherworldly singing, breathy and seductive, vulnerable and beguilingly pleading, nestles practically ideally in a dense, yet contrastingly balanced and space-opening, not at all claustrophobic, oppressive sound world of cold post-industrial beats. Dark and sinister embraces a menacing darkwave flair, hard and martial with sawing guitar under the pulsating rhythm. A kind of symbiosis Nine Inch Nails and Portishead, grim, retro-futuristic trip hop goth with a full rock finish. Raw, unvarnished and straight to his agenda, carefully designed and impressively consistent.
It moves within this framework, with these associations She Reaches Out to She Reaches Out to She following, the dynamics and orientation vary in variable nuances. The archetypically positioned in the tracklist House of Self-Undoing takes over, for example, with a decidedly brisk, rumbling groove (and has to put up with the question of how much would be left with a production without the strikingly driving, simply running drums) where Trent Reznor climbs onto the stadium stage, while the muffled slacking The Liminal retreats into a dreamy longing that Tricky and let James Blake imaginatively wallow and rave about until the finale in the form of the powerful closer, which strides up to a self-confident howling solo, and a very formidable closer Dusk one can only be accused of having been cut too short, when a compact record with a total of 42 minutes would have deserved a more expansive gesture here at the latest.
That the first half of the Möbius strip She Reaches Out to She Reaches Out to She Although it turned out to be a little stronger than the second, or at least the last third, it in no way diminishes the holistic, homogeneous quality of the album. If Everything Turns Blue as pulsating pop swaying in a trance, galloping on the edge, hinting at the vague prospect of epic momentum or slowing down to dystopian melancholy with a few touches of piano Tunnel Lights rears up in the strobe, may leave a compositionally more impressive impression than when it plucks with a great hook Eyes Like Nightshade wandering over a rattling sea of shards of muted electronics to the fairytale underground variety show, like the effective one These New Puritans-Remix one The Notwist-Sketch for Martina Topley-Bird or Ioanna Gika.
Also Salt lives from its refrain, but even more from the vividly repeated image that Wolfe draws over so many subtleties in the sound, while the enigmatic drama of Unseen World in its gentle score panorama, as well as the yet solemn Lana’esque piano ballad driven by determined beats Place in the Sun function less in isolation and more in context.
In the sound world so artfully positioned by Wolfe and Sitek between the landmarks proclaimed here, the personal unfolds more openly than before, brooding in a suddenly sober world. “Watch this empire/ As it burns and dissipates/ Haunted, on fire/ On the wings that we create“ und „I will go through the fire” Wolfe sings at the end, but leaves behind less scorched earth than a particularly fertile breeding ground for the 40-year-old, who is constantly mutating in style.
She Reaches Out To She Reaches Out To She von CHELSEA WOLFE
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