Wolves in the Throne Room at the Rickshaw: some thoughts

Cover for Primordial Arcana, by Wolves in the Throne Room

I have a bad history with interviewing Satanists. I crossed some lines with Sistrenatus/ Funerary Call, rendering my interview with him less than useful to him; I would have done a few things differently, with benefit of hindsight. Attempting to learn from that experience, I took pains to be VERY very respectful with Blasphemy - not even realizing those guys KNEW Harlow - only to have the Straight add one of those smartass captions to the photo they ran that (while admittedly pretty funny) got me in a bit of trouble with the band (the singer actually warned me not to come to the show because there were people who were pissed off! They assumed that *I* was the one who wrote it...). I learned thus that there are certain classes of people you just don't want to be pissed off at you, and Satanists are kind of up there with NeoNazis, tax officials, and your wife. I have sometimes wondered if my tongue cancer stemmed from some sort of curse one of'em might have placed on me, or something. (Probably spending much of my 20s and 30s as a pack-and-a-half-a-day cigarette smoker had more to do with it, but the Satanic curse angle is more entertaining: speaking of which, there's a free idea for a film: update Night of the Demon so that it's about a music journalist who has been cursed by a Black Metal band and is going a bit bonkers over it. Could work!).

Wolves in the Throne Room, playing tomorrow at the Rickshaw, do not identify as Satanists, but they do want to evoke some sort of ritualistic, paganistic connection with the spiritual energies of the Pacific Northwest - which at times can be kind of foreboding and inhospitable; you don't have to be in Ross Bay Cemetery to occasionally get a dark, creepy vibe from some of our forests, I've found. I've encountered trees that scared me, landscapes that wanted me gone. I had a weird-ass quasi-mystical mushroom experience where a friend and I were tripping late at night on the theme of crossing artificial boundaries, where we found ourselves by total accident in the backyard of a house, only to discover that TWO DEER - two of us, two of them - were doing their own boundary-crossing, raiding a fenced-in garden. We watched one of the deer almost FLY as it cleared a fence. It was awe-inspiring and filled with strange symbolic import, but later I discover that I'd left my tobacco pouch in the forest, and since tobacco is an important part of First Nations ritual - I was dealing with a First Nations teacher, of a sort, back then, who had instructed me to leave a bit of tobacco if I took a feather off the ground, or such - I took the loss of my tobacco as an exacted payment for the "lesson" we had been taught, that the lines and borders humans live within are arbitrary, more about the illusion of control than actual control, and that the natural world doesn't really care about them very much. Which was fair enough - reconnecting SHOULD cost something. 

I'm not even really all that interested in metal anymore, but I like the IDEA of Wolves in the Throne Room - that they draw on black metal without falling prey to its cliches or extremes, and that they do so out of an authentic engagement with - an attempt to evoke - the spiritual elements of the forests and landscape around us. I like that concept almost as much as I do their music, in fact; and seeing them live was also a fascinating experience. They played almost entirely in the dark, with very little to light them save what seemed to be some sort of open flame on the stage. (I have no idea what, exactly, that consisted of, of if the same thing will be onstage at the Rickshaw tomorrow (April 29th): maybe there will be some sort of portable barbeque pit? I'd seen Neil Young set out giant flickering candles around the perimeters of the stage at Fuji Rock for a performance of "Like a Hurricane," but there was other light for that show, whereas to my recollection, there was no such thing at the Venue.) The darkness and the intensity of the music were trance inducing, so much so that an overzealous security guard gave me crap for falling asleep, which is NOT what I was doing: I was trippin' on the music (I don't think drugs were involved THAT night, but just the mood of the space and the sounds they were making were mind-altering.)

Alas, the band had a very short time between ending their European tour and coming up to the Rickshaw tomorrow, and were not able to answer the questions I'd hoped to ask of them. (At least I didn't piss them off - or don't think I did!). There are other interviews with them online, if you're curious - they're an unusually grounded, serious-minded metal band, so much so that they were tapped by Godspeed You! Black Emperor to play All Tomorrows Parties, which is a pretty interesting thing. I would have loved to hear whether they had interesting interactions with that band, and I was curious whether the waterfalls in the video for "Mountain Magick," off their most recent album, had any connection to their new logo (their more readable variant was designed by "the Lord of the Logos" Christophe Szpajdel, whom I interviewed on video here, but I don't know if he did their current one). Was the waterfall in the video one of importance to the band? What kind of cultural tradition does the Shaman in the video come from? Have they ever had dealings with any First Nations black metal, like, say, the Pacific Northwest band Gyibaaw? Do they feel jealous of First Nations people, ever, for having an indigenous pagan connection to the land around us?

It does strike me that the band has adopted more of the genre trappings of black metal since I saw them in 2012 - there are images of them online in costume and something at least akin to corpse paint, which even the Wiki on them notes they eschew. Is this an attempt to enhance the element of "ritual theatre" in their performance - because that 2012 show DID feel like a ritualistic event - or is it a response to external pressures (from fans, labels, promoters?). They look a bit more LIKE a black metal band than the people I remember from the Venue, who were tough and long-haired, but pretty normal-looking. Then again, the room was kind of dark that night. They COULD have had makeup on, but no one would have seen it. 

Though I liked that they weren't particularly "costumed" when I saw them eleven years ago - to be honest, I also don't mind very much if they ARE dressing up more for photo shoots these days, since their music is still intense, beautiful, and darkly profound, and presumably their stage show will be, as well. If you like the idea of music that pushes towards a transcendent experience, of music as ritual theatre, of zoning out to trance-inducing heaviness in a very dark room... there's no band quite like them. Check out their most recent album here. 

Wolves in the Throne Room play the Rickshaw tomorrow (Saturday, April 29th) with Vancouver band Tribunal opening (they're not what I expected, actually pretty cool - check that video out, too!). Tickets and further information here.