Review: Chelsea Wolfe at The Orange Peel
The weather must have gotten the memo that Chelsea Wolfe was in town.
Dreary clouds and plodding rain bore down on Asheville for most of March 6, a fitting backdrop for the California-based goth rocker. Yet that didn’t dissuade a sizable crowd from checking into The Orange Peel to hear her play in support of her latest album, She Reaches Out To She Reaches Out To She.
I should clarify here that “goth rock” is perhaps a better aesthetic descriptor for Wolfe herself — with a penchant for long black dresses and the trappings of witchcraft, she’s the only artist I’ve seen sell an “altar cloth” from her merch booth — than for her music. Although often dark and heavy, her work also draws from folk, electronic, and industrial traditions, all while aspiring to singer/songwriter intimacy.
When playing live, that means Wolfe and her three-piece backing band get up to quite a lot of low-tuned guitar and hissing synths, but all of that harshness stays restrained below the level of her airy soprano vocals. Swaying from side to side, hands clasped around the microphone as if in prayer, Wolfe leaned into the texture of the music instead of trying to overpower the audience.
That decision marked quite a turnabout from the night’s opening act, the Australian doom metal duo Divide and Dissolve. Although Takiaya Reed started her songs with lovely beds of looped saxophone, each tune moved into monolithic lines of heavily distorted guitar paired with massive tom hits from Sage Paden. There was a house-show earnestness to it, but I found it hard to distinguish one track from another in terms of part-writing or emotional affect.
In many places, Wolfe’s subtler approach worked well. Drummer Jess Gowrie, for example, did a great job defining sections of songs through different triggered electronic samples rather than changes in volume. Ben Chisholm, the longest-standing member of Wolfe’s touring ensemble, laid down surprisingly jazzy keyboard chords that at times made her voice feel like it was ringing out of an underground cabaret, not a cavernous rock hall.
Like the steady late-winter rain outside, however, Wolfe rarely ripped into a true cloudburst. She and her band showed the capability for it, and from what I heard, I wanted more. At its highest registers, her voice issued forth in a piercing wail, and for several songs she really bulked out the music through electric rhythm guitar. Lead guitarist Bryan Tulao’s solo tone, deployed only a couple of times, was like an eagle screeching across a sky of lighting and cumulonimbus.
In fact, Wolfe decided to pull back the intensity as her performance wound to a close. Her bandmates left the stage entirely, leaving the singer alone with her guitar to play an acoustic mini-set/encore.
The crowd seemed to lose the thread here. While I’ve attended shows with spellbinding acoustic interludes at the Peel — most memorably Punch Brothers, Mipso, and They Might Be Giants — here the audience kept up a low-level but audible chatter as Wolfe tried to bring them into her quieter songs. At one point in this acoustic portion, Wolfe even asked, perhaps only half-jokingly, “Am I boring you?”
The crowd responded in the negative, but it was hard to shake the sense of rupture. And as everyone filed from the venue, the rain outside had ended, the meditatively gloomy atmosphere lost into the night like dissipating fog.
(Photo by Ebru Yildiz)
