When discussing her fifth full-length album, Abyss, Chelsea Wolfe has made mention of her trouble sleeping, and how they didn’t just inspire her when it came to writing material for the album, but how they have influenced the album as a whole. In particular, Wolfe has made reference to her problems sleep paralysis as having made the most significant impact upon Abyss. Appropriate then, that I arrived at the album off the back of one of my more turbulent night’s sleep, especially seeing as how it had culminated in sleep paralysis as it did. Appropriate? Outright coincidental!
For those unfamiliar with sleep paralysis, in essence, imagine waking up to find yourself unable to move, and unable to speak, and no matter how hard you try or how conscious you know your mind is, you cannot change that fact. Imagine then, that that this might be accompanied with a crushing weight on your chest and the feeling of suffocation; or perhaps a pitch blackness because you can’t open your eyes, and unable to move you begin to believe you may just be your mind now; or maybe your eyes are open and your sleeping body casts nightmares on the wall that you can’t escape from.
With that in mind, and the equally pleasant associations that the album’s title conjures down, you might imagine that Abyss is going to make for quite a heavy listen, and you wouldn’t be wrong. This is easily Wolfe’s heaviest album to date, and though, always having been partial to drones, dirges, and doom, and even having always been at least a little metallically inclined, nowhere has Wolfe embraced this more than she does here. That’s not to say Abyss is a metal album, though. No, this is very much a Chelsea Wolfe album, and her eclectic influences are very much present; starting from folk music and branching out through electronica and film-scores by way of post-rock and noise.
‘Carrion Flowers’ starts proceedings, though, and holy shit does it make itself known; arriving on some of the thickest and dirtiest sounding synths you’re likely to hear this year, it builds layers of glitchy electronics on top of each other, like the activating components of some wonky mecha-Moloch, waking up to lay down some apocalypse, all the while Wolfe’s ethereal vocals weave their way in and out, before mecha-Moloch gets his shit together and unleashes a punishing industrialised assault. And that’s just the start, grandiose and brilliantly intense, but as the track reveals, there’s just as much of a reward in knowing when to release tension as when to build it.
Whether it be the extreme dynamics of ‘Iron Moon’ with its cacophonous crescendos contrasting its somnolent sombreness; ‘Maw’ and its differing densities; ‘Grey Days’ with its twisting tempos; me knowing when to quit it with the nonsensical alliteration; or ‘Crazy Love’s ability to encapsulate the title of Wolfe’s previous album, Pain is Beauty, perfectly, by being able to transform between a quietly pleasing acoustic mantra-ballad and something stranger, more uncomfortable, and maybe painful, through the addition of staccato strings, and wailing feedback in the background that almost sounds like screams – the rewards of both tension and release, as well as rise and fall, are apparent throughout the album.
However, this skilled deployment of tension and release isn’t just confined to individual songs, but instead can be found across the album as a whole; ‘Carrion Flowers’, ‘Iron Moon’, and the doom-metal-meets-slowcore of ‘Dragged Out’ build and hold tension, the ghostly and lush ‘Maw’ releases that hold for the most part, before ‘Grey Days’ grabs it again with haunted strings, broken mechanical rhythms, brooding bass, and sporadic explosive outbursts, ‘After The Fall’ and its narcotic electronica struggles between letting go and squeezing tighter, before ‘Crazy Love’ eases it for sure and allows the stunning ‘Simple Death’ to let go completely, only to be bound and throttled by ‘Survive’ and ‘Color of Blood’.
Not only does this show a finesse for making an ‘album’ – something that rewards sitting and listening through as a whole – but it shows just how much of a harbinger Wolfe referencing her sleep paralysis’s influence over the album was. From start to finish, the album seems to convey the experience of sleep paralysis perfectly; the initial frozen fear, suffocation, and hallucinations; the internal struggle to force your consciousness outwards; the escape; the tossing and turning, half-dreaming/half-awake; peace finally, only to be torn away again as you fall into the abyss you began in. Then closing track ‘The Abyss’ plays out on taut, out of tune, and paranoid piano keys, like the internal soundtrack of the snapped insomniac, too afraid to try sleep. Which sounds harrowing, but works perfectly as the coda to an album that is as brutal as it is beautiful, both calm and storm, and definitely somewhere between awake and asleep. Wolfe’s most ambitious album to date.
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