Chelsea Wolfe

Chelsea Wolfe
The Grime and the Glow
(Pendu Sound,2011)

absolutely perfect gothicly corrupted pop music from darkly inclined chelsea wolfe. wolfe's sound can begin sweetly in the pop realm and then veer wildly into industrial clatter or zola jesus-style crooning. like mushy or even esben and the witch, the music here seems to emit from a darkly glowing netherworld between sleep and nightmare, where bedroom musicians either cloak their tunes in festering noise washes or whittle down the harshness to reveal a shimmering pop nugget. there's a lot of space between the clatterings and whisperings: 'the grime and the glow' is one of the creepiest lps we've heard in a while.
L.A. native, Chelsea Wolfe  has a taste for the sweet blood of gothic noise music, giving her vocals over to
a grim and remorselessly gloomy style of garage goth-rock also comparable in no small part to the earlier Zola Jesus records. There's a lugubrious, lead-hearted aesthetic at the core of 'The Grime and the Glow', from overcast neo-folk like 'Cousins Of The Antichrist', to chillingly maudlin garage in 'Moses', the solo piano extractions of 'Benjamin' and the Marissa Nadler atmospherics of 'Halfsleeper', but the most tangible, memorable moments occur with the scouring guitars of 'Bounce House Demons' and the incredibly ethereal 'Widow'. Don't pass over this one, there's just something about it.