Chelsea wolfe - the dark review
In her ninth studio album, metalhead singer-songwriter Chelsea Wolfe tunes her abrasion toward something more graceful and grounded - and in doing so, perhaps sounds more formidable than ever before.
Chelsea Wolfe’s intensity feels more like creation than destruction, even at the peak of her violence and fervor. Beneath the frostbitten wit and flint-solid vocal acrobatics, she moves through The Dark with the conviction of someone who has already burned through her pain in private - as though she came to terms with what she was singing long before she ever played it, and is now simply having fun worldbuilding with the broken-down material. Coming from someone with as ghoulish a past as Wolfe - battling with sleep paralysis and insomnia since childhood - The Dark was, according to her, about “letting go … being in my early 40s as a woman, growing older and wanting to be who I am now”. Pairing her maturing emotional instincts and a background as a powerhouse metal vocalist with the soundscape’s Elephant Graveyard quality - cratered, ceremonial, self-selecting - The Dark feels like something of an unrushed victory lap for Wolfe.
From the first note, album opener and lead single ‘Cold’ establishes her self-purifying intentions without an escape hatch left open: ‘I’m letting you go/I’m letting you win/I need to know/Who I am without you/When I’m with you/I feel so alone’, an oath to herself held up by thumb-strummed acoustic and encircled by singular, bottom-dense drum strikes. For all of its sonic gravity, there is something almost disarmingly ordinary about the declaration: Wolfe isn’t mythologising her pain so much as making the fairly human decision to leave it behind. Successive track ‘Seethe’ sets its gaze on a similar opponent as ‘Cold’, if with more resolve and finality. ‘You don’t see me/but I see you/Got my knife in my pocket’, she sings alongside a frigid, scoliosis-ridden guitar line that all but establishes her cautious elbow-bumping with traditional rock - close in literal tuning and energy, but too spacious and circular to ever tumble downhill with itself.
Then on, songwriterly tracks like ‘Halo’ and ‘Swallower’ descend to a slightly more ground-level plane without curling into themselves entirely, alternating between cold shocks of feisty drum-guitar perpendicularity and a woolier surround sound absorbing her liquidated wine-drunk vocals. Despite some more inward-turning moments speckled throughout the album, Wolfe’s soul-metal background is still apparent; in the particularly troubled self-incarcerated metal experiment ‘Turn the Key’, stable yet blotted background electric guitar throttling alongside skintight drums as she pushes toward stable-screamo vocal flips.
Penultimate track ‘Death is Not the End’, co-produced by former Nine Inch Nails bassist Justin Meldal-Johnsen and Warpaint drummer Stella Mozgawa, shadowboxes perhaps more than any other track on the album, casting bruises on the ground level with each lofty cloud-riding vocal manoeuvre. Nearly as high-vantage-point as ‘Death is Not the End’, ‘Dancer in the Sky’ stacks upon itself patiently, with studio-spanning piano wrapping around a pyramid of golden, piping vocals - reaching a higher-drama anthemic crest than is typically native to Wolfe, yet staying just regulated enough to not discredit the emotional clarity that she protected since making the promise to herself in ‘Cold’. If anything, the mutual self-abdication and regality of ‘Dancer in the Sky’ confirms the most exciting bit of Wolfe’s recent growth: even in her stormier moments, she’s still salt of the earth.
