Chelsea Wolfe - Hiss Spun

Until Hiss Spun, Chelsea Wolfe has never really set both of her musical feet into the world of metal, but her uniquely sinister and gothic folk on Apokalypsis and Pain Is Beauty drew the attention of metal publications, and me, and her heavier approach on Abyss (as well as her involvement with various metal projects as a guest vocalist) seemed to justify this unexpected attention. Hiss Spun is the realization of the hopefully inevitable exposure of Chelsea’s metal side in it’s full colors. She sticks to what she’s been doing well and unlike anyone else, but with a more familiar doom-y post-metal wall of sound behind her fatal swooning. I imagine I’m not the only one who was eager to hear her take the metal influences she wore on her sleeve and wear them all over on this project, a potentially risky move on her part. I don’t know about the rest of the metal community that’s kept up with her, but I am quite impressed with Hiss Spun. Her investment in heaviness certainly paid off with great returns. Where before her creepy, uncomfortable aura within her music was more subtle, with Hiss SpunChelsea’s still inviting presence becomes more menacing in the context of the instrumentation behind her, and the album opener captures this transformation of her musical character nicely, weaving her beautiful but spiraling vocals into a chaotic, pedal-heavy guitar dirge. By the time her transition into the more overtly dark persona she takes on is complete, she sings what seems like an ode to a helplessly evil possession by darkness on “16 Psyche”, a sentiment continued in a more embracing fashion on “Vex”. Chelsea clearly took her time in crafting these songs to her strengths and her identity as an artist, not losing herself and what sets her apart as an artist in the booming and easily overwhelming guitar sludge, stepping into the metal sphere with precise care. There’s no doubt that Chelsea works the more heavily sludge-y doom metal style well, transforming from a more laid-back and harrowing folk singer into a necessarily aggressive metal frontwoman while making the two not sound all that different. If anything is unfortunately lost in this translation, however, it is the subtlety and the ambiguously sinister air that the unique “doom folk” of Apokalypsis carried, but it kind of comes by default with the trade-off for a thicker, louder sound. With these apparent choices, I don’t mind Chelsea opting to confidently forge new territory for herself rather than limiting herself with a safe foothold in her old style, especially since I have a hard time myself imagining both a full-fledged commitment to a heavier and more dense sound coexisting with the spacious darkness she cultivated on her first albums. Hiss Spun’s weaknesses are few and far between, but there are moments when the naturally droning nature of the doom metal underlying songs like “Scrape”, which is not at all poorly constructed (Chelsea’s increasingly wavering wails being the highlight of the song), drags lightly across the floor rather than hover over it. Said closing track I also felt to be in need of a more climactic feeling to finish what was Chelsea’s most bombastic and sonically powerful album. “Two Spirit” I also felt to be a bit of an unneeded break in the metallic rhythm of the album, and not exactly as eerie in the context of the record’s closing minutes as it might have been on Abyss, perhaps. I do think Chelsea outdid herself on this one, though, even if there are some spots where the challenge of her transition is apparent. While she may be more comfortable with the less upfront style of her previous home field efforts, her away performance in heavier territory was anything but a loss and she certainly deserved to be applauded for her efforts on what is one of my favorite albums of the year.