Wolves in the Throne Room - Two Hunters

For a while now, Wolves in the Throne Room's Diadem of 12 Stars has been a favorite album of mine to fall asleep to. That probably wasn't its intended use, but every time I hear its beautifully droning guitars and almost complete lack of rhythmic variation, I head for the land of Nod. Sure, the record has blastbeats - but it has so many, they turn into blurs of hummingbird wings.

Dia Artio (excerpt)
I Will Lay Down My Bones...(excerpt)

I recently saw Wolves in the Throne Room play live. At first, I was surprised at how upfront the drum kit was onstage. When the trio started playing, though, I got it. Drummer Aaron Weaver runs the show. The guitarists do tremolo picking and fast strumming the whole time, so it's up to the drummer to create dynamics. And Weaver is a friggin' force of nature. He had the whole room rotating around his sticks. His kick drums were at ear level; the cannonade was the most sensual auditory assault I've heard in ages.

Thankfully, Two Hunters (Southern Lord, 2007) brings this out. The production is stronger and wider than before, though it's hardly slick (I'd wager that the band recorded and mixed sans computer like before). The guitars still do the droning thing, but this time, Weaver really switches up feels, with well-timed crashes and pulsing accents within blastbeats - and the recording captures that. Live, this was nothing short of exhilarating. On record, it's stimulating.

Black metal campfire jam

Two Hunters' four tracks range from six to 18 minutes in length. The first track is black metal-less, with swooning keyboards that nail the "My Bloody Valentine gone metal" vibe 10 times better than Jesu does nowadays. It sounds like Angelo Badalamenti meets The Angelic Process - extremely heady stuff. It also doesn't sound like anything else on the record, so the transition to black metal is somewhat abrupt. But I'd love to see the band explore this further, as much of its black metal verges on shoegazer territory, anyway.

Like before, there are occasional female vocals, which work well with the shoegazer vibe. If the band continues on this path and ties these elements together, it'll leap far, far ahead of the pretenders to MBV's crown. Meanwhile, it's produced an album of extremely strong parts. Somehow, this whole Hydra Head/Southern Lord black metal thing is starting to make sense...