CELESTIAL LINEAGE IS AN OUTSTANDING CLOSE TO WOLVES IN THE THRONE ROOM’S TRILOGY
While at work a few years ago, as I was hammering out document after document in my cubicle, listening to Wolves in the Throne Room battle the sound of my fingertips hitting the keyboard, a co-worker popped her head in letting me know that what I was listening to sounded like “funeral music” to her. Of all the niches I’ve heard Wolves in the Throne Room get thrown into, I thought this one was the most interesting. I guess I could see where she was coming from to an extent — the mournful vocals lent by Jessika Kenney on Two Hunters wouldn’t by any means seem out of place as an accompaniment to, say, a roaring funeral pyre. That very element, in fact, was what really took that album to another level for me. So of course I was glad to hear the beautiful, haunting voice grace the band’s newest release, Celestial Lineage.
Fans of Wolves in the Throne Room have come to expect a certain quality hard to exactly decipher or pinpoint with each anticipated album. That sort of earthen and, at the same time, undeniably ethereal sound, which invokes visions of rain soaked forest beds, or cavernous ruins of a long lost congregation of mystics. Of course, I could be completely alone in these specific conjurations, but the fact remains that the brothers Weaver continuously deliver not only meticulously well-constructed pieces, they create an intricate landscape with each note, each chord, each painful cry, taking the listener to another realm entirely. Rounding out the trilogy set forth with the sorrowful Two Hunters, and followed by the more punishing Black Cascade, the release of Celestial Lineage is anything but anticlimactic.
