Celestite, or Celestine, is a mineral of an occasionally delicate blue colouring. It makes for some awful pretty crystals, and sometimes appears in geodes. The world’s largest known geode being a Celestine geode, of 35 feet in diameter. It is also the principal source of strontium, which is often used in fireworks and metal alloys. Celestite/Celestine crystals are also believed to hold healing properties. Now isn’t that a pretty bit of background information? All healing powers, pretty colours, and fireworks.
A little too pretty for the title of an album by American black metallers Wolves in the Throne Room. Well, that might have something to do with this album being unconventionally pretty, in a dark and an ominous sort of way, for a black metal band. It may also have something to do with Wolves in the Throne Room generally not being a conventional black metal band.
Creeping into their second decade of life now, Wolves in the Throne Room, have always done black metal their way. That way has entailed a substantial amount of ambient, post-rock/metal, folk and doom elements, skipping over the corpse paint, and stage names. There’s also the eco-friendly agenda they’ve got going on, to tie in with being more inspired by nature and Paganism than church burning and Satanism.
However, whilst uncommon, that’s not exactly unheard of in black metal. Celestite though, is more than Wolves in the Throne Room doing black metal their own way, it’s abandoning drums and harsh vocals, and replacing (for the most part) traditional metal instruments with a shit tonne of synths. Essentially what Celestite is your more symphonic black metal but without the more typical black metal elements. It’s those background atmospheres, those moody synths, those mysterious woodwinds and brass, those nightmarish strings, all of that, brought explicitly to the foreground.
Turning Ever Towards the Sun starts the album in a sprawling and sparse eleven-plus minutes. Sounding more like the outreaches of space than being lost in Norwegian forest, but then layers fall and rise into place and you can see a Carpathian castle surrounded by haunting woods, but in space. It’s fucking cinematic basically. Further testified to by Initiation at Neudeg Alm, which starts once again spaciously with a very sci-fi soundtrack quality before it suddenly stirs into the moodier, broodier moments of A Clockwork Orange’s synth heavy soundtrack.
Essentially, what I’m saying is that there is a Stanley Kubrick film lurking somewhere behind this album. This may not be black metal as you know it, it may not even be Wolves in the Throne Room as you know them, but in spite of that it is definitely both of those things. Sure, some might cry out that it’s not even remotely black metal, that it’s ambient electronica at best or a score without a film at worst. However, they would be wrong, because even without the tropes one might come to expect from black metal, the atmosphere, the mood and the feeling evoked by tracks like the dramatic rise and rise of Sleeping Golden Storm is black metal through and through at heart.
A stunning instrumental album that encapsulates both the serenity and tranquility of space and the intensity and fear of nightmares. Something I hope to experience live too, seeing as I missed out on the opportunity of seeing these at All Tomorrow’s Parties’ I’ll Be Your Mirror festival as me and my friends were just way too stoned.
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