From the opening chimes and drifting synthesized winds, it’s apparent that this is going to be a monumentally epic work. Opening track ‘Thuja Magus Imperium’ is almost twelve minutes in length: empires have fallen in less time. Jessika Kenney’s vocals are clear, timeless and pure, evoking mythical lakes and ancient forests, before the maelstrom of napalm guitars, explosive percussion and Nathan Weaver’s snarling, impenetrable vocals lay it all to waste, before finally, everything comes to a majestically sweeping conclusion.
And so the tone – and battlefield – is set for an album of raging torrents of noise. Like forest fires tearing through the ‘Woodland Cathedrals’, these are colossal aural adventures that go on and on with unremitting intensity: take, for example the ferocious ‘Subterranean Initiation’, which is impenetrably dark, yet at the same time magnificently evocative. The last couple of minutes have an almost heroic, heraldic feel, and far from being inaccessible, would comfortably fit the soundtrack of a climactic film scene.
There are brief interludes, with ‘Permanent Changes in Consciousness’ providing cold comfort, a bitter wind blowing through the spartan shelter it provides from the sonic storm and the eternally dark night filled with demons and Lucifer only knows what, while ‘Rainbow Illness’ is genuinely calming, rays of light dappling through the forest’s canopy as birds sing. These are sounds of life, of joy... but they’re transitory, with the dark ceremony of ‘Woodland Cathedral’ marking a sacrificial offering before ‘Astral Blood’, which introduces a mystical-sounding harp before the sweeping deluge strikes. The deliberate, heavily echoed plucked lead guitar sound in contrast with the massively overdriven rhythm is reminiscent of Fields of the Nephilim’s ‘Dawnrazor’ and is haunting, sinister.
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The eleven-minute ‘Prayer for Transformation’ is a fitting climax to the album, sounding as it does like the final surrender into the eternal inferno.
Wolves in the Throne Room Online
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