I want to know what's inside me. Ethereal wave, gothic rock, noise rock, ambient, drone, industrial; all are things you can catch during the course of Hiss Spun's twelve tracks. This isn't the first time the two genres have met - take Type O Negative or Paradise Lost, for example - but this particular mixture of crushing riffs, ethereal vocals, and delicate electronic touches come together in a novel fusion of the styles which sounds distinctly different from goth-doom blends that have come before. Her first proper studio album, The Grime and the Glow, was released in 2010. In terms of metal alone we're talking a mix of doom and sludge most of all, and even the odd part that hints at a blackgaze influence. .
In addition to her own work using metal elements, Chelsea Wolfe has also appeared as a guest performer with a number of other metal artists including Myrkur, Russian Circles and Mutoid Man. This music owes a lot to all kinds of genres. It's taken me quite a few complete listens before I've felt that I'm ready to write about the album in light of how many different elements can be found in it. Hiss Spun is very far from a monotone release. Over time, a certain doom metal tendency has crept into her work, with preceding release Abyss in particular working aspects of doom metal into her sound; now, on Hiss Spun, Wolfe brings that to the fore, offering a fusion of gothic rock and doom metal. Nearly a year later, Wolfe returned with the more electronic-leaning Pain Is Beauty, which featured Chisholm as a co-producer as well as the work of longtime bandmembers Kevin Dockter and Dylan Fujioka.
She then collaborated with King Dude on a pair of split singles and appeared on Russian Circles' fifth album, Memorial. The album arrived in August 2015. I wanted to open up more, but also create my own reality. I can't promise it will be an instant love affair kind of release, but it's certainly one worth checking out, especially if you're a seeker of the unusual and the challenging. Sargent House is proud to release Hiss Spun to the world on September 22nd, 2017.
The album is obviously a metal based record first and foremost, but don't expect it to sound like anything else you've ever heard. Wolfe took a few musicians, including Chisholm, into the Northern California woods to record Unknown Rooms: A Collection of Acoustic Songs, which was released in October 2012. The record became very personal in that way. I want everybody to open up. Hiss Spun isn't an easy album to describe in words. She has been active since 2009, but composing music long before that, including the full album Mistake in Parting in 2006, which was never officially released. Wolfe grew up in Northern California with a father who had a country band and his own home studio, so she was immersed in music at an early age and began recording herself at age nine; by the time she was in fourth grade, she knew she wanted to be a singer.
I'm like an imbecile with a can opener in his hand, wondering where to begin—to open up the earth. Combing so many different sounds makes the album a difficult one to come to grips with. Some parts such as during Twin Fawn amplify the heaviness even more though. Chelsea Wolfe is an American musician whose work has spanned a number of musical genres, from dark folk to darkwave and gothic rock to doom metal. These ultimately became the focus of her fifth album Hiss Spun, released in 2017. Wolfe recorded with her friends on a portable eight-track, the results of which became her 2010 debut album, The Grime and the Glow. Recording with mainly her usual collaborators, the album also includes several guitar contributions from Troy Van Leeuwen of Queens of the Stone Age fame, along with a guest vocal from Aaron Turner, of the now defunct post-metal band Isis.
Some songs like Offering do dial back the heavy elements, but that sacrifices little of the record's atmosphere. White noise is a constant thread through Hiss Spun, with Wolfe finding solace in the knowledge that radio static is the sound of the universe expanding outwards from the Big Bang—a reminder that even dissonance has ties to creation. However, it wasn't until 2009, when she returned from a three-month tour with a performance artist friend in spaces including old nuclear factories, that she began making music for others to hear. Starting with her fourth album Abyss in 2015, Wolfe began to incorporate more heavy elements into her music. With her last album Abyss 2015 Wolfe also started incorporating aspects of metal into her music.
Some songs such as the heavy singles 16 Psych and Vex, the latter being the one where Aaron Turner delivers some growling vocals, are among the most instantly appealing ones that stand out as highlights, while others work much better in the context of the album as whole, such as opener Spun, which serves up a noise rock influenced fuzzy and menacing doom vibe. I know that underneath the mess everything is marvelous. Never mind that Wolfe's own vocal style is rather ethereal and gentle, if anything that only makes the music sound darker than ever. But there's so much being applied to it from outside the entire metal spectrum that it ultimately comes across as something that can only be described as experimental and atypical. Lone, an hourlong movie directed by Mark Pellington and featuring music from Pain Is Beauty, was released in 2014. With an artist like Chelsea Wolfe it's impossible to know where she'll take her music next, or if it will have anything to do with metal, but she's certainly made her mark on the genre with Hiss Spun. Music is rendered out of dissonance—bomb blasts from the Enola Gay, the shriek of primates, the fluttering pages of a Walt Whitman book are manipulated and seamlessly integrated into the feral and forlorn songs of Hiss Spun.
For her fourth full-length, Abyss, Wolfe shifted gears again, focusing on the doomiest, metal-inspired aspects of her music. And this one really feels like it's all about building the mood up to those aforementioned singles, which are much more direct. That's simply because there is a lot of different styles going into this record. I listen to a lot of metal releases each year but it's rare that one comes across as fresh as Hiss Spun does. It's this sound that she has near fully embraced for Hiss Spun 2017 , her fifth main studio album. Along with Chisholm and Fujioka, her collaborators included producer John Congleton and Russian Circles' Mike Sullivan.