Review by Gary Spiller for MPM
A Cimmerian darkness descends, nearly nine years to the day after selling out her last Bristol headline show at The Fleece the enigmatic genre-busting Chelsea Wolfe makes a triumphant return to the city. This evening there’s an upscaling of venue to the Marble Factory and ticket sales have responded in kind with an extremely healthy sized crowd packed into the former Bristol Gas Co. retort house.
The venue’s post-industrial interior is totally perfect for Wolfe’s seething musical cauldron. One that liberally pours forth the molten alloy of doom metal, electronica, gothic rock, and Scandia folk coated in her trademark crepuscular ambience.
It’s Wolfe’s first post-Covid headline venture to Europe and the anticipation of hearing material from the new album, her first in some five years, ‘She Reaches Out to She Reaches Out to She’ has definitely fuelled the expectation levels. Not quite sold out but only the merest of fractions from it.
It’s a full-on ‘pea souper’ as tonight’s support act Mary Jane Dunphe takes to the stage with just a guitar and lap-top for company. For the next 35 minutes or so we’re transfixed with her avant-garde art-school inspired performance. Is it neo-goth or is an art-based electronica; at times Dunphe weaves between one or the other but in the main harnesses both with seemingly consummate ease.
Having spent a number of years on the Western US seaboard in a varied career with the likes of the punky Vexx right through to the country-rock furrows of The Country Lines it’s now time for Dunphe to set her own terms with her debut solo album ‘Stage of Love’. Released last year Dunphe draws just over half her eight tracks from it. From the 80s New Wave Electronica inspired titled track to the set-opening ghostliness of ‘Moon Halo’ it’s clear we’re in the presence of a stringently unique personality.
The first of newer material the muscly ethereality of ‘Seasons’ – released alongside ‘Fix Me’ at the beginning of this year – possesses a bass line the Sisters of Mercy would die for. Interspersed between more from ‘Stage of Love’ the spotlight is turned upon recent singles the breathless ‘Uriel’ and set closing ‘Fix Me’ and its attendant gothic undertow.
A manic dervish, a whirling marionette Dunphe cuts a figure somewhere between Lene Lovich and Bjork with a voice strong enough to drill holes through slabs of rock and a stage presence to match. Her theatrical interpretive dance choreographics are clever and bewitching whilst not distracting from her crystalline vocals. A perfect opening act for Wolfe I’m intrigued as to how Dunphe would sound with a band around her.
With little in the way of spoken interaction and even less in the way of front-lighting quite how Chelsea Wolfe creates such a strength of identity and intrigue lies within the powerhouse of her music and the intelligent intricacies of a synched lighting show. The Marble Factory is pretty much full of ominous arcs shooting through, a palpable anticipation ensures a quickening heart rate. Dry ice billows and spills off the stage in hues of purple and blue.
Just a couple of nights after All Hallow’s Eve the haunting aesthetics of the funerial chimes of the intro are met with complete reverence. A pin dropping would have been greeted as a most unwelcome of intrusions. Exorcist styled keys maintain the atmospherics as goths, arty hipsters inclined to Radio 6 listening and a smattering of metalheads rub shoulders with one another somewhat slightly uneasily. By the end of the 80 minutes that follow, we’re drawn together unified as one in the appreciation of witnessing a majestic odyssey.
Wolfe’s band take to the stage first ahead of the Princess of the Dark’s arrival. Tactile lightning strikes as the band forge forwards as the Californian singer-songwriter arrives centrally. Despatched in book-ended fashion the completeness of Wolfe’s seventh long-playing studio offering ‘She Reaches Out to She Reaches Out to She’ is delivered with an arsenal of gothic lightlessness punctuated with seething post-metallic rage writhing in an oily, industrial pool of rippling electronica.
The opening four tracks of this year’s release – with the obsidian heart thump of ‘House of Self-Undoing’ and ethereal symphony of ‘Everything Turns Blue’ switched about – leads the Marble Factory by the grasped hand into a realm of darting shadows and enigmatic silhouettes. The hypnotic ‘Whispers in the Echo Chamber’ entwines the trip-hop beloved of local mid 90 heroes Portishead in a slow burning seething meld of nu-metal and gothic undertows.
It’s dark, very dark quite aptly for ‘Tunnel Lights’ – if there was ever a wedding march for the undead this track is it – and its powerhouse surges. A snippet of the Cranberries’ legend ‘Zombies’ lifts the roof into the night skies. Taking up her beloved Gibson ES-335 Wolfe tears into the opening acerbities of ‘16 Psyche’. A full moon rising it’s engrossing in the extreme teetering on the precipice threating to plunge at any given moment.
With an underworldly kinetic unleashed the brooding ‘After The Fall’ follows. Joy Division headlongs right into the angst of alt-metal a swirling melancholic that strays into the doom / black metal environs of Amorphis and Dimmu Borgir. ‘The Culling’, All About Eve on metalliferous enhancing steroids, detonates wildly into a raging tempest. The Bristol gathering is transfixed as wave after wave of anarchic currents wash over.
Acoustic tones sweep in the hauntings of ‘The Mother Road’ as orange flames dance upon billowing backdrops. Bowing in the direction of Jeff Buckley’s ceremonious cover of Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’ Wolfe’s imperious dispatch of ‘Flatlands’ is electrically compelling sufficiently enough to provide powerage for a city. If only this could be harnessed there’d be a green energy solution. Ironical given that we stand upon the site of where coal was heated to generate the gas for the nearby gasworks.
A loud primal cheer is generated by the opening notes of the thunderous ‘Feral Love’. A summoning of other worldly woodland spirts it’s an amorous arcane incantation. We return to the new album with the melancholy of ‘Salt’, a 21st century successor to the throne of Portishead. A coruscant beauty in crepuscular environs.
The coiled serpent grasps its own tail in the chilling supernatural lament of ‘Unseen World’ that slips seamlessly into the deadly aggress of ‘Eyes Like Nightshade’. The gentle shimmerings of ‘Place In The Sun’ drops the tempo for a moment. Wolfe’s vocal divinity upheld in fine fashion by the strongarm talents of her band.
Echoing in the cloisters ‘Dusk’ is halted by Wolfe as she notices a member of the crowd in trouble. Requesting assistance, Wolfe and her band respectfully wait to resume until the situation is resolved. A nebulous allure it shifts between Portishead to Linkin Park via sonic gothic effluxes.
Alone with her acoustic six-string Wolfe slices into the eeriness of ‘The Liminal’ to close the main body of the set. Spellbinding in its completeness deserved 110% is given as spines are tingled throughout. The pulsating powerhouse of ‘Carrion Flowers’ violently swerves as the storm froths at the mouth. A more compelling triumph you will struggle to discover. Wolfe sits in a region of her own construct obstinately defying genre definition. This is a thing of great burning pulchritude and acumen. Wolfe’s return is awaited eagerly.
Photography by Kelly Spiller for MPM
