Celestite, the latest work of Wolves In The Throne Room, will surprise quite a few fans of the band since, for the occasion, the Weaver brothers have taken the luxury of giving a follow-up in ambient form to the previous album Celestial Lineage. Nothing of what the U.S. musicians have accustomed us to listen to in all these years, which have seen them stand among the bands symbol of the U.S. underground scene, has been poured into this full length and, said so, I do not doubt that this can leave more than one listener perplexed. In fact, if it’s true that artistic freedom is one of the cornerstones on which you have to base the activity of a musician, there is nothing left but to listen to the disc without any prejudice, even if the use of a different moniker, for the specific occasion, would not have appeared an idea so peregrine. Beyond all these considerations, what matters most is that Celestite, despite a discrete duration and a stylistic choice anything but winking, manages in the enterprise of not boring, which is anything but obvious when we are faced with similar operations. All this is in favor of the talent of the duo, which offers a strong connotation ambient space electronics, so as to remind me, in some passages, a disc that I bought in 1987, to be exact Babel by Andreas Grosser and, above all, Klaus Schulze, one of the proponents of the clearance of these sounds against the general public at the beginning of the 70s. Just for this ability to reproduce in a very personal way those icy and solemn sounds at the same time, the Weavers pass with flying colors this test that was full of pitfalls because, let’s be clear, to be able to keep alive the listener’s attention giving up almost entirely to those characteristics that have made famous the name of Wolves In The Throne Room, was not an easy task. The three quarters of an hour of Celestite turn out to be, after all, much closer in depth than they appear to be at a formal level, to the beautiful melodies set in the black metal skeleton of the masterpiece Black Cascade and show us, simply, a different face of a band and musicians that, in the course of a career not very long but already significant, have always shown the natural tendency to a stylistic progression completely free from calculations or conditioning of any kind.

2014 – Artemisia Records