I had already caught Chelsea Wolfe’s performance at Vacation Vinyl a while ago, and here she was again, opening for Ceremony with a full band, at the Center for the Arts on Thursday night. She played some of her majestic gothic-folk, which had a sort of mystery and uncanniness, sometimes breaking up into a sort of stormy violence.
Dressed in black of course, and almost constantly hiding behind her long dark hair, it was difficult to see any of her facial expressions, whereas her vocals were blurry and haunting, drowned in reverb, making some echoing-windy loops during the first song.
The music was mostly atmospheric and sinister, sometimes transporting us into a desolated land or forest populated by mysterious sounds, sometimes stretching between pain and despair but never totally choosing the dark, and really sounding like nothing I had heard before. For a Californian native, she has a taste for some cold Trans-Siberian land, as she cultivates her witch-like image habiting her possessed and moody songs.
If she has white-d out her eyes on the cover of her album ‘Apokalypsis’, her eyes, when I could see them, were surrounded by dark shadows, making her look like a real queen of darkness, not totally in the Ozzy-sense of the term, although there were real metal riffs in this noise-rock when I think about it. But if there was metal, it was transcended by something more… spiritual? Her keyboardist, who kind of looked like Conor Oberst, was heavily participating in this haunted house ambiance with his church-organ dramatic riffs on certain songs.
It was spooky and ghostly, edgy and sludgy, full of aggressive drum beats like the song ‘Demons’, or following a depressing line like this other song ‘Mer’, and its almost Radiohead-ish unusual rhythm, gloomy and doom like ‘Feral Love’, fuzzy-ice like ‘Moses’, atmospheric like ‘Movie Screen. And it was as if, in the middle of all these frozen soundscapes agitated by destruction and uneasiness, Chelsea Wolfe’s voice was the warmest thing around.