Wolfmangler "My Guitar Wants to Kill Your Wolves" CD
[Digitalis]
This is the latest band featuring Smolken from the now defunct Dead Raven Choir, and this is somewhat similar in general aesthetic, though slower, but still basically sparse and rather unusual. The majority of the music for this release was recorded live, with only the vocals being added in after the fact (in most cases). The instrumental "Jesien" (the shortest track at merely 4:37) begins with nothing but rumbling bass drones, twisted scraped/pulled strings, and lots of random improvisational noise textures created with stringed instruments for a somewhat uneventfully improvisational opener. This flows into the start of "Irrlichter", which lays in some slightly melodic sustained lead guitar notes (briefly) before introducing some faintly whispered vocals minutes later, carrying on for more than 14 minutes. "The World's a Stage" opens slightly louder and more ominously, with soft vocals coming in quickly and reaching more of a spoken tone. This piece has some percussive background sounds and a generally more resonant and aggressive string attack from the instrumentation, though still very slowly flowing and sparse as a whole. The final selection is also called "Jesien", this time topping 12 minutes, and using a deep half-speed track underneath live recordings at regular speed, making for a very full sounding piece that has a bit more constant ambience to it. Certainly the most bleak and impressive selection on this disc. The recording definitely sounds live. It's not so bad, though. A little raw, a little muffled, but nice and warm, with a good sense of pulsing low-end thickness. I'm not really into the guitar tone, something about the distance makes it come off as a little unnatural and unassuming, but guitars play a small role, so that's not a big deal. Aside from some poor typeface choices on the back cover, the packaging looks exceptionally awesome for a simple little xeroxed sleeve. All of the imagery is sinister and abstract, with a transparency of the illegible (yet awesome) band logo over the cover in barely visible black on black. There's no insert or anything, but the inside cover is hand-numbered of only 89 copies, with credits on the back indicating that most of the lyrics are borrowed from the works of poets (Rainer Maria Rilke, Hilaire Belloc, and Krzysztof Kamil Baczynski). All in all this is an interesting and promising release, but one that I find boring. I like the approach, but it needs some more meat on its bones to really start to take form and become as effective as it could be. The cover art on this thing is seriously amazing, so perhaps I'm guilty of getting my hopes up too high based on that, but there's enough intrigue here to where I truly feel the parties involved could do much, much stronger work. I'll keep my fingers crossed. (6/10)
Running time - 38:36, Tracks: 4
[Notable tracks: The World's a Stage, Jesien]
Digitalis Industries - http://www.digitalisindustries.com

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