She Reaches Out to She Reaches Out to She by Chelsea Wolfe
Over her last six albums, Chelsea Wolfe has balanced musical moods—metallic doom, gothic atmosphere, electronic noir—on the fulcrum of singer-songwriter classicism. On her seventh, She Reaches Out to She Reaches Out to She, Wolfe controls that balance with the finesse of a tightrope walker.
She also balances familiar associates alongside newer collaborators: Ben Chisolm, who has worked with Wolfe since her debut full-length, 2010’s The Grime and the Glow, contributes synthesizer, piano, and drum programming, while David Andrew Sitek, co-founder of the experimental indie-rock band TV on the Radio, enters Wolfe’s circle as main producer.
Wolfe concentrates on the vocals, whether laying them down or approving Sean Everett’s mixing-console decisions, which shift subtly between moments when Wolfe emerges from the surface of a song and when she sinks beneath.
The opening track, “Whispers in the Echo Chamber,” shows how many different ways that surface can vibrate, incorporating sudden scribbles of keyboard, a regularly pounding industrial beat, and churning guitars that could have come from an early and slower Nine Inch Nails track.
Atop the deceptive gallop of “Everything Turns Blue,” a melodic pulse a la Montreal electro-pop duo Majical Cloudz is what really propels Wolfe’s turn toward Kate Bush’s ethereal style. And in the computer-treated tribal-suggestive rhythms of “Eyes Like Nightshade,” her voice soars as if finding some parallel slipstream.
With writing credit shared among Wolfe, Chisolm, primary drummer Jess Gowrie, and lead guitarist Bryan Tulao, the songs evidently feel the pull among each musician’s influences, including the darkwave potential of Tori Amos (“Tunnel Lights”) and the pale-dancer sway of Depeche Mode (“Dusk”).
Again, though, Wolfe balances those influences with the stronger pull of how she sings the words, and with the intelligence that she reaches out to past and future versions of she, both artistic and personal.
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