CHELSEA WOLFE – The Grime and The Glow

BRANDON:  All right. Let me get the basics out of the way. Chelsea Wolfe is a Los Angeles based singer/songwriter who describes her music as a blend of goth folk, experimental rock, and spiritual realm funeral songs. Her first full length album, The Grime and The Glow was released in December of 2010 by Brooklyn’s Pendu Sound Recordings and it seems very few people are talking about it. That’s a shame. I brought my friend and personal audio vole, Sarah, to rectify that situation.

It’s easy at first to want to try to compare Wolfe to any number of great past and present female singers.  On the album’s opening track, Advices and Verses, she sounds a lot like Lykke Li, and “Advices” even feels like it could fit neatly on Lykke Li’s brilliant Wounded Rhymes. I could also see comparisons being made to Patti Smith, Kate Bush, or even Bat for Lashes on any given song. The easiest touchstone is early PJ Harvey, whom Wolfe often lists as an influence. But when taken as a whole, it becomes evidently clear that The Grime and The Glow is a wholly unique effort, equally enchanting and haunting. It’s epically cinematic and seems to float in a terrifyingly ethereal haze. Wolfe herself nods to Ingmar Bergman and David Lynch as reference points, but, and this might just be the film nerd in me, I can’t listen to the album without thinking of early 20th century filmmaker Jean Cocteau, one of the fathers of experimental and surrealist film. Wolfe’s song “Benjamin” could seemingly soundtrack his entire 1946 film La Belle et La Bête (the original Beauty and the Beast), it captures the mood so perfectly. (And, as a side note, if you haven’t seen La Belle et La Bête, get yourself a bottle of wine, light some candles, and settle in some haunting shit.)

“Advice and Vices,” I think is the most accessible track on the album, and it was probably a wise move to start there. For me, though, “Moses” is the standout. Her yearning as she struggles against a sludge of blues and fuzz is visceral. I feel like I can see her wading waste deep in a bog, her white, muddy dress pulling itself through the reeds and muck, struggling amongst the dead to impart her plea, or warning.

Sarah, what stands out to you about this album? And how would you classify it? I feel like a lot of newer music has taken a turn for the dark. But if bands like Salem and Creep and Balam Acab are being labelled Witch House, I don’t think we can throw Chelsea Wolfe under that same umbrella, can we? Also, since so many artists are taking their sounds to the graveyard, do you see Wolfe being able to separate herself from the masses or will we remember her as just another gravestone in a field full of them?

Chelsea Wolfe – “Moses”

SARAH:  I played this album in my car while I was driving through Detroit on Saturday. Storm clouds hung heavy in the sky, empty plastic bags drifted across the even emptier road, a few souls loitered on the street corners in front of abandoned downtrodden buildings. I left the warmth of my friend’s home and stumbled into a zombie flick soundtracked by Chelsea Wolfe. Spooky, enchanting and, sometimes, rockin’. I feel like Chelsea has a little Detroit in her blood.

I picked up The Grime and the Glow after listening to ‘Moses’ on Stereogum. They ran a piece focused on some of the darker sounds of 2010, which I admittedly hadn’t really explored before then. Out of all the tracks I sampled, “Moses” jumped off the page at me. I love the simplicity of that song: straight quarter note guitar line, super basic beats from a drum machine (to me, it sounds like a beat that only a non-drummer would string together), and voice. She got her hooks in me and I wanted to “git scared” with Chelsea.

You mentioned that ‘Moses’ is the standout track in your opinion. But ‘Moses’ is somewhat different from the rest of the album, right? Not everything is as identifiable, structured, or “accessible” as that track. It definitely feels at home on Grime but we don’t get the strong guitar sound throughout the other ten tracks. Are you disappointed that there aren’t more clear-cut rock moments on this album?

Beyond the funereal, the goth folk, and the fuzz, I hear the four classic elements in this album. There’s wind in the last 20 seconds of ‘Advice & Vices,’ in the vocals of ‘Move’ and the whistles of ‘Gene Wilder.’ ‘Benjamin’ is Water, Earth has ‘Noorus’ and ‘The Whys’ (dirt in your headphones), while ‘Deep Talks’ is a fireball of sound (not to mention the album’s given name with Glow). Some classic element systems include a fifth element: ether or “void.” Chelsea Wolfe spends a lot of time here.

I don’t think we can label this album Witch House. That seems to be a catch-all term in use right now. I looked up Wikipedia’s definition of Witch House and it says something about noise/drone/shoegaze sounds being recontextualized in an “aesthetically referential sinister atmosphere” (whatever that means). Chelsea Wolfe is certainly sinister but the comparison ends there. I think she’s better described as “industrial funeral folk” or “blair witch rock.”

I like what she’s doing, though. She’s got another album coming out in a few months and I’m looking forward to making some of the brightest summer days just a little bit darker. Where do you think this sinister spin or “witch house” movement is coming from and how can we separate the authentics from the bandwagon goth music-makers? Let’s keep exploring the dark side.

BRANDON:  Sarah, I just loved your take on the album. I hadn’t even thought of contextualizing it in terms of the four elements, but the album really does feel of the earth in the Wiccan or Pagan sense. Though that seems lazy on my part, as anything gothic and spiritual can easily be contextualized as Wiccan or Pagan.

Personally, I was charting a competition between Grime and Glow. By my count, Glow beats Grime 6 to 5.

You mentioned that you thought “Moses” was different from the rest of the album, but really, the entire album feels to me to be an experiment of styles, which is actually thrilling in kind of the same way The Mircophones The Glow pt. 2 was an amalgamation of a seemingly endless array of ideas. A better example might even be Bat for Lashes’ Two Suns, which saw her channeling six or seven different styles throughout the album. But I actually think “Moses” fits on the album better than the opener “Advice & Vices,” the most accessible and radio-friendly song on the album. (Though, to be fair, it’s not that radio-friendly, unless you have a really kick ass, non-Comcast-owned radio station.) Nothing else on The Grime and The Glow comes close to matching that song’s catchy, simple comfort.

I do wonder if, this being her first full length, Wolfe isn’t still trying on different cloaks to see which one fits best. There are myriad directions she can go after this initial foray, be it toward the bluesy drudge of “Moses” and “Bounce House Demons,” the noise of “Deep Talks” or the moody ethereal haze of “Benjamin” and “Halfsleeper.” I’m really excited to see how she follows this up on her next LP.

In regards to genre, I want to point out two things. One, her cover of black metal band Burzum’s “Black Spell of Destruction.” And two, this awesome review of her album from Metal Army America that begins “Chelsea Wolfe is black metal.” So there.

As per your question about the impulse driving this darker sound, I’m not sure I can say. In Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, he wrote that comedies were most popular when societies were failing, while tragedies reigned supreme when they were thriving. He likened it to the dark spot one sees after looking at the sun. Perhaps it was the Bush years in all their horror that gave us Los Campesinos! and The Go Team! and Boy Least Likely as a means of escapism, and now the optimism of Obama has caused a darker trend. Though it’s not like the state of politics or our country has really been all that bright. Really, though, I think these things just ebb and flow. For a while there it was cool to sound happy and cute, and now it’s cool to sound edgy and dark. My hope is that it makes Vampire Weekend either irrelevant or the new Tears for Fears.

SARAH: Final thought:

I’d like for someone to organize The Grim AfFair, a festival celebrating the sirens of the dark and completely undoing the Lilith Fair in one fell swoop. I think ATP could pull something like this together successfully. We’ll all wear black and alternate between rocking out, swaying to the ethereal, and doubling over beneath the weight of the world. We’ll buy overpriced food from a limited number of vendors and mourning veils from the merch guys. I’m totally in.

BRANDON:  Me too!