These Iowa psychpop-kraudrone-WTFwave weirdos return with their second full length for De Stijl, the group now expanded from a duo to a trio, with a sound that while still weird, continues to move further away from the twisted noiseness of the early releases, toward something distinctly more melodic and much more accessible. Mixing their psych-kraut tendencies with something that sounds much more like some lost new wave /cold wave artifact, due in no small part to the deep dramatic crooned vox of frontman Shawn Reed, he of the late great Raccoo-oo-oon, but the band get all wave-y too, weaving a lush twisted backdrop of synth buzz, and driving drums, the bass thick and fuzzy and sinewy, the sound rife with playful almost carnivalesque melodies, the sound often blossoming into sun dappled prismatic clouds of swirling synth shimmer, but just as often locking into a tranced out hypnorock mesmer, if these guys were an instrumental band, they'd definitely be a whole different beast, some sort of heady, druggy psych-kraut-prog combo that would fall more in line with groups like Cave, Lumerians, Gnod and the like, cuz the instrumental stretches here get downright blissy and trancey and dreamily psychedelic, the vocals though give it a distinctly goth-pop cast, adding some Suicide and Spacemen 3 and Interpol to Wet Hair's sonic equation, and transforming this into something much weirder, and in its own twisted way, much cooler.
An acoustic record might seem strange coming from Chelsea Wolfe, whose two records The Grime And The Glow and Apokalypsis, seemed to rely heavily on the production and surrounding sounds, the murky home brewed outside alchemy of the Grime, and the churning blackened full band energy of Apokalypsis, but as much as those records were about sound, they were more about the songs, and Wolfe may have wrapped her songs in all manner of bleak sonic gloom and dusky dolor, but it did little to disguise the power and emotion of her songwriting.
Unknown Rooms is Wolfe reconnecting to the country and folk music that inspired her, Townes Van Zandt, Hank Williams, and is not strictly 'acoustic' in the sense of just voice and electric guitar, no the sound here is much more fleshed out, the guitar and vocals are obviously the focal point, but the sound is gorgeously lush, songs laced with muted simple percussion, minimal drumming, shimmering strings, multitracked vocal harmonies, the production too, spare and cavernous one second, muted and washed out the next, some tracks here sounding clear and bright, like they were recorded in a proper studio, others, like the darkly delicate "Hyper Oz", sound like they were recorded at home, in the grey light of morning, hushed bedroom dreamfolk, and others, like "Boyfriend", sound like neither, hovering in some netherworld where it's perfectly natural for aching downer folk to be flecked with strange analog synth blurts. And of course Wolfe's vocals are divine throughout, rich and throaty, and swaddled in subtle smears of echo, often slipping into a witchy falsetto, the effect electric. Some folks at aQ hear Wolfe on Unknown Rooms as sounding a bit like Marissa Nadler, but Wolfe seems to be exploring a world much darker.
The record starts with "Flatlands", which is stirring and moody, starting out spare and stripped down, underpinned by haunting string shimmer, before blossoming into a lush sprawl of classic pop, the switch into the soaring sweetly melodic second half, and the final minute of swirling strings are stunning, and definitely set the stage for the rest of the record. "The Way We Used To" finds Wolfe sounding a bit like Zola Jesus, but the sound recast as a spare apocalyptic folk, the sound anchored to a gorgeous looped harmony vocal refrain, Wolfe slipping into that divine falsetto for the chorus. Those falsetto vocals bleed over into "Spinning Centers", hushed and dreamlike, with lush chordal swells, pizzicato strings, the vocals hushed and delicate and crystalline. And so it goes, song after song, which somehow play like lost classics, dusted off and reimagined, Wolfe's eerie folk as much indebted to the classics as to whatever darkness must haunt her musical soul.
