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Wolves In The Throne Room - Two Hunters CD (album) cover

TWO HUNTERS

Wolves In The Throne Room

 

Tech/Extreme Prog Metal

4.13 | 60 ratings

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horsewithteeth11
Prog Reviewer
4 stars I'd like to start by mentioning that, despite my enjoyment of many different types of metal, black metal really isn't a genre of music I cling to. I find most of the lo-fi production (most of it just sounds poorly produced to my ears) and lack of evolution and change in structure displeasing. I do like several forms of minimalistic music, but black metal generally isn't one of them. The big names in the genre do little for me, and I find many of the acts that come after them to be fairly formulaic. I did enjoy Slayer when I was younger, but as I started gaining a deeper understanding of musical theory and general knowledge, as well as reading an interview in which Kerry King admitted that he doesn't know how to solo and just lets his guitar feedback for all of the bands' solos, I started to drift away from black metal of any kind.

Well, enter Wolves in the Throne Room. This band may very well have completely changed my negative outlook on black metal. They've taken a genre of music that is typically associated with generic Satanic lyrics and church burnings and made it relevant to my interests again. To anyone who says that black metal is dead in the 21st century, I would ask them to listen to this album. Two Hunters is a collection of only 4 songs (although two of them are major epics) that has a play time of 46 1/3 minutes, but it feels like such a short musical journey every time I listen to it. I used to think that atmospheres this bleak and dark only came from chamber music and avant-garde music. But this band incorporates ambience, folk, and some of those avant-garde elements into their music. The production is definitely lo-fi, but it doesn't feel like it's irritating to my ears. It just fits the music very well in my opinion. In fact, some of the atmospheres make me think of a Univers Zero type of darkness, so this is indeed pretty bleak stuff. The drumming, especially the bass drumming, is fast and unrelenting and the guitar and bass chug along to help build the atmosphere. Nathan Weaver's lyrics are entirely incomprehensible to me, but that's acceptable for this kind of music. I simply treat them as another instrument and appreciate them as another tool to add to some of the darkest atmospheres I've heard in modern music.

Wolves in the Throne Room may not be a band that fits everyone's tastes, but they've surely appealed to me. In fact, it took me several listens to even begin to appreciate the atmospheres that the band produces. I feel like I can find something new in them each time, and Wolves in the Throne Room is really good at building their atmospheres. This band has reignited my interests in black metal again, and I plan on exploring some of the more experimental bands in the genre with time. This album may very well be a masterpiece, but until I explore more black metal bands and get a greater understanding of the genre, 4 stars will have to do. Hopefully WitTR has a long and prosperous career. Their music should allow them to be more than able to do so.

horsewithteeth11 | 4/5 |

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