OLD PAPER: Wolves In The Throne Room (Rock-a-Rolla #19, Mar/Apr 2009)

2009 flashback: Aaron Weaver interviewed in the time between Two Hunters and Black Cascade releases.

My sense of the passage of time is completely screwed up by these pandemic years, and judging by the number of memes I see about it, I’m not the only one. Even without that, I started feeling a bit weird about it around the passage of the first decade of this century - I can tell you precisely if a record I like is from April 1994 or November 1987, but if it was released between, say, 2011 and 2020 the best I can give you without checking is probably “the other day or so”. So I’m not really sure if 2009 will feel like it was a long time ago to you guys. Numerically it doesn’t feel like it immediately, but once you start going through magazines or newspapers of that time - which is a fun experience for any year of the past, I recommend it! -, then yeah, it feels like another lifetime. Take this issue of the now defunct (since 2016, which actually feels kinda recent, or does it?), and much missed, Rock-a-Rolla magazine, which covered a full array of weird and wonderful bands that no one else would touch at the time:

Yeah, Isis were still around and about to release ‘Wavering Radiant’, and we didn’t know it’d be their last album so we were happy about it. Look at other stuff we were excited about too, from the news pages:

Someone should go back in time and tell us to calm down a bit, as that reunion and that awesome superband would go on to produce a grand total of two albums between them in the next thirteen years, but oh well. Anyway, with the context firmly illustrated, let’s go to what brought us here in the first place, which is Wolves In The Throne Room. Fortunately they remained awesome and productive since then, and having had their first show after the pandemic on the recent Decibel Metal & Beer Fest, performing the iconic ‘Two Hunters’ in its entirety (because it’s fifteen years old, if you want more crazy numbers to make your head hurt), they’re now ready to go hit stages all across the world. So I thought it’d be nice to remember that time I talked to Aaron Weaver while he locked himself inside the toilet of the Italian venue he was going to play on that night (the interview wasn’t done in person, I feel I should add at this point) because it was the quietest place to have the chat. The aftermath of the success of ‘Two Hunters’ was being felt, and they were about to release ‘Black Cascade’, in hindsight a difficult transition album after such a landmark, but nevertheless featuring a couple of tunes that have aged wonderfully well, such as opener ‘Wanderer Above The Sea Of Fog’, which still features regularly on their live set.

Here’s the lovely two-page spread:

…and feel free to zoom in and read the interview here if you want to get that sweet magazine feeling, or just be practical and use the full text below. I suggest blasting ‘Black Cascade’ while you do it!

WOLVES IN THE THRONE ROOM

Thinking back to a mere three years ago, when Diadem Of 12 Stars came out on Vendlus Records, an album by this strange black metal band with the odd long name - everything seemed alien about Wolves In The Throne Room, from their concept and ideology (rooted in eco-spirituality), far removed from the more orthodox black metal norm, to their actual sound, deeply atmospheric and infused with ambient and even psychedelic elements. Either for their uniqueness or for the sheer quality of their music, the scenery has changed dramatically since 2006. Wolves In The Throne Room are now revered by many, and have even gathered a horde of admirers outside the underground black metal circles. Right now, it's hard to avoid them, with three releases surfacing in just a few months — the Live At Roadburn LP+DVD, documenting their performance at the 2008 edition of the festival, Malevolent Grain, a two-track 12" EP and, above all, the forthcoming third full-length, Black Cascade.

"It wasn't that hard, even if there seems to be a lot of things going on," says drummer Aaron Weaver, brother of vocalist/guitarist Nathan Weaver, about the wealth of recent discographic activity. "The Live At Roadburn album was completely out of my hands, for example, as the label called me telling me they wanted to put it out. We really liked the idea, because we loved playing at Roadburn, and we were also impressed with the whole package, with the vinyl and the DVD and all those things. The Malevolent Grain EP consists of a couple of songs that we were working on before the full-length record, and there was considerable time between the two pieces of music, so neither of these things really got on top of each other. But it's definitely a lot going on, of course.”

Aaron is clearly pleased about the band's current moment, something that is only betrayed by the weariness in his voice, which is understandable — the talented drummer is talking to Rock-A-Rolla down the line from a toilet in Italy, the quietest place in the venue where they're playing tonight, and he has been nursing a back injury for a couple of days. Still, he soldiers on.

"The tour has been going really well, I'm happy with how things are going,” he says. "It's nice to tour in Europe, bands are very well received and it's a different feeling to be here.”

Both the American and European audiences of the Wolves' latest tour have already been subjected to the dark magic of the new album, Black Cascade. "We've played all the material from the album on tour, in its basic form," he says. "The songs have a really strong live feeling to them, and when you play them in concert they really take on a life of their own and they acquire the character that you really want them to have, so it's good to do that.”

No puzzled looks from the audience, then? "We're so loud and the experience is so intense, that sometimes it doesn't matter if you've heard the song before or not. But the new material feels really good to play and I'm really excited about it.”

Despite the excitement about most aspects of these tours, for someone with so much dedication to other activities outside music, like farming and homesteading back home in Olympia, Washington, music has been perhaps too much of a consuming affair for Aaron. "Yes, music has consumed a lot of my time in the past year, much more than it should have, even,” he admits. "I have a lot of things going on in my life besides music, but still, it feels good to write songs and have releases out and everything.”

It would be natural that, with such an apparent joy for playing live, enough to get over all the more negative aspects of it, and with the recent experience of the Live At Roadburn release, Wolves In The Throne Room might think of doing something special related to that. Aaron confirms so. "We've already talked about creating a piece to be recorded live, which would make sense for us. There is an ideology behind and a specific reason why we play music, and in a lot of ways, going on tours and releasing records on record labels is a compromise for us. An outdoor performance that we might do, a piece with more of a psychedelic component, that could in a way capture a live recording that would be something that we would like to release.”

Would it be a purer, less compromised version of the band, then? "Not really, I don't mean to say that our records are something that we aren't passionate about,” he explains. "It's just different. We like to do different things within the band, cover several aspects of being the people we are and playing music together.”

Perhaps because of their well-documented rural way of life, Wolves In The Throne Room seem like a more tight-knit unit than most bands. Does that reflect in the writing?

"When it comes the time to write a new record, we get that feeling of being able to write music together, it's usually in the fall. That's the time of the year that we have to write music, as on the other times of the year we're usually working outside on other projects,” reveals Aaron. The new album, however, seems to go beyond that autumnal peace. "Black Cascade is very much a metal record, it's quite unrelenting," reveals the drummer. "It still has those dreamy elements that are a part of our sound, but it's very harsh and it's quite dark.”

Is that a product of any change in the creative process, or did it just turn out like that? "We usually have the same way of doing things,” he replies. "First we decide on the concept of the record and then we start putting together the melodic elements. What we do is try to have an idea of the structure that the album will have. What phrases go in the beginning, the middle and the ending, and then we create the four songs that make the record out of that.”

A big change, however, has been the change of guitarist — Will Lindsay (ex-Middian) joined the band last year, Malevolent Grain and Black Cascade are the first recordings to feature the new recruit. "Yeah, of course it's a new factor in our sound. A change like that is really important, and Will added a lot. We've been friends for a long time, for some twelve years, so he adapted well, and I would say that he sounds like the band, so it was the perfect choice.”

As for the immediate future of the band after this burst of activity of late? "We'll be touring on and off until July. Afterwards, the plan is to take a long break from music. I have many other projects, so it'll be at least six months before I start thinking about it again.”

With Black Cascade to help us through, we'll manage...