Dead Raven Choir "Death to Dead Wolves" CD
[Jewelled Antler]
This is among the select few professionally pressed releases from Dead Raven Choir's extensive discography, and it looks beautiful! There's almost no text on the outside of the package, and in fact aside from the tracklist in the booklet there's scarce text anywhere. Just bleak images of mountainous landscapes, trees, and sheep in a fog-laden field. Very nice, indeed. And in fact this is also one of Smolken's finest offerings to date: A very consistent set of sparse, obscure, bleak folk compositions with all lyrical content borrowed from poet William Everson. Most all of the instrumentation is stringed (a bit of guitar, but mostly bass, troll cittern, tenor banjo, and mandolin), and it's not your standard performance. The tracks revolve around generally quiet, spacious plucking and string scraping with varying levels of whispered/hissed vocals. Variations in the playing are the key source of dynamics herein, as the plucking sways from violently aggressive to faint executions, and the vocals can be quite acerbic in tone. The massive 23+ minute "A Canticle to the Waterbirds" (a traditional arrangement) is louder and users piano in a similar, though slightly more openly melodic, manner along with some drone-like qualities - though the majority of the tracks run fewer than three minutes by comparison! A few tracks even use distortion, most obviously in "October Tragedy", whereas the grating "These Are the Ravens" creates feedback type of effects acoustically (very nice). Usually I have a bit of a problem with the vocal delivery as it can be quite dramatic, but things are slightly more restrained on this release, and the recording is also far more polished than usual, which also plays a role in helping the vocals feel at home. Everything is very clear and actually quite lush, so this time out it's the performance that harnesses most of the bite, rather than Smolken's oft employed raw, minimal production values. I was really quite surprised to find how smooth and flowing this set of songs is, and I enjoy that immensely. All in all this is quite a progression for the project. It's certainly not a vast departure from the previous work that I've heard, but there is an exemplification of evident growth, and now more than ever I look forward to hearing future work from this curious artist. Someone certainly needs to recognize some of these efforts with a vinyl release! (7/10)
Running time - 41:18, Tracks: 6
[Notable tracks: These Are the Ravens, Fog Days, A Canticle to the Waterbirds]
Dead Raven Choir - http://wolves.tamu.edu

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