Wolves In The Throne Room: Black Cascade

Wolves In The Throne Room began their second album, 2007’s Two Hunters, by pulling a hazy cloud of stately doom-drone over themselves before launching into black-metal convulsions. Their third full-length, Black Cascade, boasts plenty of layers and meditative breakdowns of its own, but they feel more like the lingering smoke and shrapnel kicked up in (as the band promised) a newly aggressive and live-sounding rampage. The swell of guitars that begins “Wanderer Above The Sea Of Fog” comes as close to good old raw ampage as anything the band has done yet, and “Ahrimanic Trance” begins unceremoniously with a piercing squeal of naked feedback. Guitarist-vocalist Nathan Weaver slimes his hydrochloric-mucous shrieks a little higher in the mix this time, and Aaron Weaver’s drums muscle forward too—in fact, they do more to build suspense in the marauding intro to “Crystal Ammunition” than the band’s customarily mournful, ominous guitar work. Black Cascade makes it a little harder to just sink into the gloom, but the payoff is hearing Wolves become a more thoroughly powerful metal act.