Wolves in the Throne Room & Wolvserpent – XOYO, London – 21/10/11
3/5
Tonight’s support band, wrongly billed as ‘Wolverspent’, actually go under the only slightly less absurd name of Wolvserpent, and turn out to be doom metal’s answer to The White Stripes. The stark simplicity of a bestial guitarist-grunter and skeletal female drummer duo are all that’s needed to create a raw, trance-inducing atmosphere that couldn’t be any more suited to opening for Wolves in the Throne Room. They have ‘Wolf’ (well, ‘Wolv’) in their name and hang animal bones off the mic stand; you get the picture. It’s the crushingly slow pace, deliberate simplicity and Americana of Southern Lord-style drone-doom with the wintry bite of black metal, sounding like Freezing Moon in a slow orbit around Earth. The set took a surprising interlude when the drummer rose from her languorous, gangly hammerings to serenade the audience with a violin. It managed to be even more impressively haunting than the rest of Wolvserpent’s set and perhaps the point at which the evening’s atmosphere reached its darkest and most mysterious.
Contrary to their reputation, this time around Wolves In The Throne Room did not play entirely by candlelight. The show had been moved from the traditionally metal Underworld in Camden to the trendy XOYO near Shoreditch, which, alongside the proliferation of short haircuts, flannel shirts and thick-rimmed glasses in the crowd and tote bags at the merch stall, underlines how black metal has spread from the realm of copypasting Nietzsche quotes to monochrome Myspace profiles to that of browsing Pitchfork on a Macbook, soya latte in hand.
The show is a reminder of how album-orientated this kind of music tends to be, as Wolves in the Throne Room don’t exactly have hits, or even tracks that stand out from their albums as a whole. Their songs are as long and shapeless as their beards and one bleeds into the next in a relentless torrent of woodsy grimness. The sense of monotony isn’t helped by the conspicuous absence of the female vocals on ‘Cleansing’ and the set opener ‘Thuja Magus Imperium’, moments of gentle clarity that punctuated Wolves in the Throne Room’s best studio albums. Yes, the music is suitably dark, introspective and atmospheric but the crowd are shuffling their feet a little, wondering if they might have enjoyed the same music more at home.
Artists in this article: Wolves in the Throne Room
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