Band:	Chelsea Wolfe
Album:	She Reaches Out To She Reaches Out To She
Style:	Neofolk, Experimental rock
Release date:	February 09, 2024
A review by:	Auntie Sahar

01. Whispers In The Echo Chamber
02. House Of Self-Undoing
03. Everything Turns Blue
04. Tunnel Lights
05. The Liminal
06. Eyes Like Nightshade
07. Salt
08. Unseen World
09. Place In The Sun
10. Dusk

In sound, it appears fairly streamlined and straightforward. It’s only when one begins peeling back the layers of the onion on paper that the true majesty reveals itself.

For the better part of 15 years, Chelsea Wolfe has been blurring the lines between neofolk, metal, goth rock, and a sort of distorted, darkwave-esque electronica. Like other artists who shift their sound significantly album to album (see Swans, Death Grips, Blut Aus Nord etc), one can never quite tell the exact same ways in which Madame Wolfe might combine these factors from one release to another. But indeed, that’s only what serves to maximize her allure.

It’s been a while, relatively speaking, since Chelsea dropped an actual studio LP. The last such effort from her was 2019’s The Birth Of Violence, a return to the more neofolk sound after experimentation with some much darker and heavier elements on Abyss and Hiss Spun. Then, as a follow up to a Roadburn performance, she teamed up with Converge of all bands in 2021 for the collaborative Bloodmoon: I, arguably her heaviest release yet. Where to from here?

Enter 2024’s annoyingly-titled She Reaches Out To She Reaches Out To She. This album has yours truly assuming Chelsea really gets down with her doom and sludge influences at the day’s end, as once again it sees her returning into more of a plodding, riff-heavy and metallic territory. Maybe, maybe not to the same extent as on Hiss Spun or the Converge collab, but certainly enough to whet the whistles of those who were looking for her to go more in this direction after The Birth Of Violence. “Everything Turns Blue”, for instance, sounds like the closest we might ever get to “electronic sludge”, and “House Of Self - Undoing” has a very energetic, almost galloping-type pace to its melodies that’s simply delicious.

As with artists like Botanist, Neptunian Maximalism, and others, the music of Chelsea Wolfe is particularly commendable for carrying a metal-like gravity without being overtly metal in and of itself. This arguably comes to a peak on She Reaches Out To, which even among its more restrained, neofolk-leaning tracks like “Salt” and “Place In The Sun”, demonstrates Chelsea’s weight and versatility as a composer.

With She Reaches Out To, Chelsea Wolfe offers a bite size, "happy meal" type rendition of her metallic personality. Past material has shown that this is not necessarily as heavy as she could go, but in an ironic way that’s not quite a bad thing, for it then serves to make this release a little bit more unique in sitting somewhere between Chelsea’s metal-oriented delivery and her more relaxed, melodious one. Is this then a bit of a “something for everyone" type Chelsea Wolfe album? This reviewer believes so. Play it loud and put it up nice on your year end list, metal or non.

REVIEW NUMBER 300. I chose to celebrate with this album in particular because Chelsea Wolfe is perhaps one of the strongest examples of the ultimate malleability of heavy metal music, as we charge into the mid 2020s and the beloved future of our genre. Cheers to all, 13 years and counting as an MS writer!