Wolves in the Throne Room- Two Hunters*

I'm not the biggest black metal fan in the entire world. There are some aspects of it I like (intense, melodic guitars, agonized raw-throated screaming, nontraditional song structures) and some aspects I don't (generally poor recording quality*, agonized raw-throated screaming, utterly ridiculous thematic elements, silly makeup). I'm not completely obsessed with first-wave black metal bands, I don't think Burzum's first album is the greatest thing in history, and I like to think I'm not a complete misanthrope. So there are your caveats.

Wolves in the Throne Room are one of my favorite bands in this genre. They write long (the average length of a WitTR track has to be over 10 minutes), intricate songs that lope through vast stretches of musical landscape while still remaining firmly in black metal timbre and territory. One thing most listeners (and writers) overlook when talking about black metal is the melody firmly entrenched in all the gloom and doom, and Wolves in the Throne Room deliver memorable riffs and melodies in spades. Finally, these guys actually sound decent on record! The afforementioned poor recording quality so closely associated with "true" black metal does the bands no favors, and it's refreshing to hear someone like WitTR willing to buck the tradition and go for hi-fidelity (or perhaps more accurately, ANY fidelity) sound.

Two Hunters begins with "Dia Artio," a keyboard-driven overture that evokes nothing so much as French shoegazer electronicists M83. It wasn't what I was expecting to begin the album, but it's a cool song and it works in context. "Behold the Vastness and Sorrow" follows, a 12-minute tirade of harmonized guitars, maniacal-yet-song-appropriate drumming, and screeched, echo-drenched vocals.

"Cleansing" can be taken as a development of "Dia Artio," as it takes the keyboards, subdued guitar and drumming of the album opener and adds a gorgeous female vocal line that's part-Gregorian and part aria. It's the one moment of sheer beauty on this record and works as a brilliant pinnacle towering above all the blastbeats and frantic screaming, which the track quickly (by this band's standards, anyway) dissolves back into.

"I Will Lay Down My Bones Among the Rocks and Roots" is the high point of the album and the band's catalogue to date. It begins with a melancholy clean guitar line that quickly bursts into a flurry of blastbeats and distortion that intensifies until it hits the first of several peaks in the song - a shift into half-time and the most memorable harmony riff on the album, punctuated by an opening scream that, to my ears, personifies despair (as pretentious as that sounds). A third of the way through, the rhythm section drops out and a single guitar churns through the chords signalling the next section of the song. Melodically it resembles nothing so much as a Godspeed You! Black Emperor track with the dials running in the red and the found-sound field recordings replaced with a suicidal hysteric. From here on out it's tribal drumming and a chord progression that echoes the darker moments of Failure...with hand-claps. Hand-claps. And it works! The final third of the track is introduced with a delicate finger-picked guitar line that explodes into, you guessed it, more distortion, harmonized guitar, and screaming. It all ends not with a bang, but a whimper- the female vocals from "Cleanse" return over the diminishing guitar, crooning a few more melancholy notes as everything fades out.

Probably my favorite thing about this record and band in general is their skill at transitioning from riff to riff and section to section within each song. It's virtually the only way I can think of to make a 15-minute metal song interesting, let alone an album full of 'em, and WitTR excel at it. The female vocals on "Cleansing," the keyboards liberally and effectively spread throughout the record, the superior production (hey it doesn't sound like total shit! WOW), and the stunning climax and denouement of the final track make Two Hunters Wolves in the Throne Room's best release thus far, and one of the most enjoyable metal records I've heard in 2007.

*Black metal diehards will no doubt castigate me for this. I don't care. Music should be decently-recorded whenever possible. Black metal recorded on a four-track in a cave isn't more black, it just sounds like shit.