Gothic industrial-metal chanteuse Chelsea Wolfe strips down songs at Great American
Talented songwriter and folk-metal artist Chelsea Wolfe brings her current acoustic tour to the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco for a sold-out show Wednesday night.
Raised in the small Sacramento area city of Roseville, Wolfe was writing poetry by the time she was seven and turned to writing gothic modern R&B songs (her father, a working county musician, bought her a Tacscam 8-track recorder) before she reached the age of 10. Influenced by both her grandmother's embrace of alternative medicine and philosophies and the delinquency contributed by her older sisters -- she was drinking malt liquor prior to her teens -- Wolfe would also draw on the treatment she received for sleep paralysis for musical inspiration.
While she made an abortive attempt at recording her first album in a singer-songwriter mode when she was 21, an unreleased effort that she later dismissed as "over produced" and too personal. Her proper debut recording would come several years later after she toured Europe with a troupe of performance artists playing unusual venues. The Grime and the Glow in 2010 showcased Wolfe's dark vision that layered her delicate, melodic vocals and spare guitar over menacing atmospheres and flashes of abrasive noise that recalled the dramatic work of Nick Cave, Michael Gira's Swans and PJ Harvey.
She would expand her musical palette on Apokalypsis, balancing dreamy balladry with pounding drums and howling guitars that edged closer to the black-metal influences she would later embrace. Working with longtime bandmate Ben Chisholm, Wolfe created a wide-ranging body of work that spanned from stark acoustic songs (including an EP of tunes by anarcho-punk band Rudimentary Peni) to the electronic-tinged gothic chamber rock of 2013's Pain is Beauty -- her first for noted imprint Sargent House Records -- to the more metallic, doom-laden anthems of The Abyss two years later.
Wolfe has proven her self to be open to experimentation, whether on her own albums or working on outside projects like Blood Moon, a series of four live performances in 2016 with post-hardcore act Converge where she and Chisholm played rarely aired Converge songs alongside Stephen Brodsky of Cave-In and Steve Von Till of Neurosis. Her 2017 album Hiss Spun was recorded with Converge guitarist and noted producer Kurt Ballou and featured contributions from Troy Van Leeuwen (Failure, Queens of the Stone Age, A Perfect Circle) and Aaron Turner (Isis, Sumac). Widely hailed as her heaviest work yet, the songs on the recording still managed to match the nuance and pathos of Wolfe's earlier efforts.
Wolfe would swing the pendulum back in the other direction for her next understated effort, Birth of Violence. Once again stripping her music down to the essential elemental components of Wolfe's ethereal voice and acoustic guitar, the songwriter creates a mesmerizing style of gothic Americana on haunting songs like "American Darkness," "Dirt Universe" and "Be All Things," fleshing the tunes out with spare percussion, keyboards and strings.
Her American Darkness Tour to promote the album included a pair of sold-out shows at the Levitation Festival in Austin, Texas, and featured Wolfe delivering bare-bones solo acoustic takes of those songs along with a mix of earlier fan favorites and a stunning cover of Joni Mitchell's iconic tune "Woodstock." Despite the pandemic shutdown limiting in-person contact with collaborators, Wolfe has ramped up her creative activity in the past few years. In addition to a number of digital singles working with Emma Ruth Rundle and Bay Area experimental band Xiu Xiu, Wolfe released an album by Mrs. Piss, her duo with drummer Jess Gowrie in 2020, worked with punk/metal outfit Converge on their Bloodmoon: I album that came out the following year and recorded the soundtrack to the slasher horror film X with composer Tyler Bates.
In February, Wolfe released her latest album -- the cryptically entitled She Reaches Out to She Reaches Out to She, her first for new label Loma Vista Recordings. The effort embraces a somber industrial sound with an anguished vocal delivery that at times echoes Bjork and Portishead vocalist Beth Gibbons. Wolfe embarked on an extensive tour to promote the album that included a sold-out date at the Fillmore last March.
She has since issued two EP reworking songs from the new album: the Undone EP that presents remixes of the songs by Crosses, Boy Harsher, Full of Hell and Justin K. Broadrick, and the acoustic Unbound EP that features the songwriter accompanied only by guitar and piano with a touch of synthesizer. She performed a stunning short set of songs in that spare mode for NPR's Tiny Desk Concert series joined by pianist Ben Chisholm that was posted to YouTube at the end of October (the day before Halloween, appropriately enough). The artist is closing out the year with a limited series smaller acoustic shows that have been rapturously received by fans. Wolfe arrives in San Francisco for "An Intimate Evening of Songs Stripped Bare" at the Great American Music Hall Wednesday night that is sold out. She will be joined by opener Enhancement, the solo ambient industrial project of Los Angeles-based composer and producer Ben Babbitt.
Chelsea Wolfe: An Intimate Evening of Songs Stripped Bare
Wednesday, Dec. 11, 7 p.m. $35 (sold out)
Great American Music Hall
