Pain is beauty...and intensity

Hey look my Chelsea Wolfe interview is up at PopMatters!

No Boxes: An Interview with Chelsea Wolfe
By Jennifer Kelly 1 October 2013

Chelsea Wolfe tells us about pain, beauty, synths, black metal, D.H. Lawrence and why she is really not the same as Zola Jesus at all.

“One of the things I used to really love about black metal, actually, is that kind of white noise. A lot of it has got this white noise to it that I find really comforting. Even if the song is really heavy, there’s a really peaceful white noise,” says Chelsea Wolfe, the LA-based songwriter whose dark, challenging work has ranged from metal to noise to goth to acoustic chamber folk over four albums, and currently includes elements of electro-pop. She made her mark, early on with a Burzum cover; she has, more recently, interpreted the work of Nick Cave. (She is one of the few contemporary artists to be represented on Mark Lanegan’s all-covers Imitations; he sings her song “Flatlands”, from the unplugged Unknown Rooms.)

If it all sounds a bit intense, well, it is. Wolfe’s latest album, Pain Is Beauty, plumbs the dangerous, obsessional side of love, seeing the urge to connect as a primal natural one, like animals migrating thousands of miles to nesting grounds. And there’s her other connection to heavy music, she adds. “A lot of death metal artists are really inspired by nature and use that as fuel to write music. That was actually something that inspired me a lot for this album, the beauty of nature, contrasted with the ugliness of nature.”

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On the edge of the pit looking down


And slightly softer but still intense

Mark Lanegan, frustrated crooner

The world's best (and lowest) rock voice finds itself toying with ALL kinds of ungodly shit, and, since it's Mark Lanegan, makes it sound surprisingly good. Don't even get me going on the Abba cover ("Solitaire") ...there are also alternate treatments of Chelsea Wolfe's "Flatlands," Nancy's Sinatra's "You Only Live Twice" and Bobby Darin's "Mack the Knife."

Here are a couple samples, neither embeddable...but whatever.

"I'm Not the Loving Kind" (John Cale)

"Deepest Shade" (Twilight Singers)

Chelsea Wolfe's Pain is Beauty

Just started dipping into the upcoming Chelsea Wolfe album Pain Is Beauty, and it's a good one, much, much, much better than 2011's Apokalypsis which, in my view, got the drama and atmospherics right, but did not deliver on the songs. Anyway, this one is a lot better produced and structured, not as relentlessly, screamingly intense, but more varied and melodic and all the stronger for it. She's sort of in the Zola Jesus/Austra/Julianna Barwick camp of gothy, theatrical, classically-tinged experimental female singers. Anyway, well done, have a listen.