3 out of 5
Label: Sargent House
Produced by: Ben Chisholm, Chelsea Wolfe
After years (and albums) poking at the fringes of alternative rock, albeit with a generally gloomier bent, Chelsea Wolfe started to embrace some of the heavier sides of her work with Abyss, then taking another step toward metal on Hiss Spun. This direction was pursued unto a surprising teamup with hardcore punk heroes Converge on Bloodmoon, but I think even there we started to hear Wolfe testing out how much further along on that road she wanted to travel. And so: Birth of Violence is – or how I thought of it at the time – a step back to more acoustic, softer fare.
I had the type of music right, but it wasn’t a step back.
A refresh on Wolfe’s pre-Abyss work reminded me of how indebted to 90s alt-rock it was; drums and rock kicked around next to some acoustic work, but (besides acoustic-specific releases) they were always primarily beat driven. Birth of Violence has some further explorations with electronic flourishes, and features some choice moments of brutality, but it feels like Chelsea’s first truly guitar + voice-forward work, where she trusts the mood set down by her strums and intonations to carry the songs. She’s not wrong. The 11 tracks here all have strong backbones, even with Ben Chisholm’s / Wolfe’s production softening all of the musical edges; reading the lyric sheet shows where Wolfe – to me – has evolved the most, as her thoughts on the enveloping darkness of the world (and staying strong against them) have finally crystalized into clearer and affecting tales, whereas emotions felt hidden behind the general mood and tone of the music on prior albums.
That aural softening, though, doesn’t help with the individual song structures feeling somewhat weightless, and also makes those electronic touches often feel rather out of place. A couple of songs by the midpoint of Birth really click – Erde, Little Grave – properly blending noise, and distortion, with the base layer of vocals and strums such that you’re taken on a short journey. Elsewhere, you can get swept up in the melody, and Wolfe’s ability to manipulate her singing between whisps and howls, but it often feels like preamble: each song a preamble to another preamble; I don’t wind up at the end of the album necessarily feeling in a different place than the start.
