On her acoustic record Unknown Rooms, Chelsea Wolfe allows a few sunrays to poke into the lightless sepulchre she built on 2011's Apokalypsis. That record, with its gothic, bloodstained imagery and bleak post-punk guitars, carried all the warmth of a medieval hex: It opened with a gurgling, feral scream that sounded like something peeling off your skin with its incisors. Wolfe's vocals channeled PJ Harvey in full Rid of Me "lick my injuries" mode, and earlier she'd released a cover of the cheery Burzum number "Black Spell of Destruction". It spooked a lot of people to attention.
Unknown Rooms, as she told Brandon Stosuy recently, was her attempt to connect to her "folk roots," citing a love of Townes Van Zandt and Hank Williams. But this isn't exactly her campfire record, unless that campfire is surrounded by plague and marauders: Wolfe has kept the kernel of eerie blankness and premonition even as she tones down the vampy theatrics. Ironically, she digs even deeper into your skin than before. Sometimes a lullabye can freak you out even more than a midnight horror flick.
Her voice, in these wide-open arrangements, emerges as stunning: Her whispered, wispy high notes on "The Way We Used To" and "Spinning Centers" are lovely and convey unsettling frailty, like a hurt creature lurking in a corner that you aren't sure you should touch. The imagery isn't accidentally chosen: Wolfe seems powerfully drawn to vulnerability-- hers, yours, ours-- and she finds multiple ways to make you taste this unease. One of those is to make herself sound weak, trembling: She floats tiny, wordless harmonies in the background on "Spinning Centers", multi-tracking her close-mic'd voice into a pale, enervated choir. Around her, bowed string harmonics sigh dryly, drawing her further out of her body into the surrounding ether.
The songs themselves are stark, still, often nothing more two open chords strummed in common time. Surrounding them are a violin or two, muted horns, and acres of the white space. In their fidgety stasis, the songs capture some of the poetic nervousness of early Cat Power: When Wolfe whispers "Boyfriend, be careful if you can," on "Boyfriend", drawing the word "boyfriend" haltingly, like an extraterrestrial voicing its first English word, I was reminded of Marshall's "Nude as the News", where news of a pregnancy is delivered as end-times prophecy: "I've got a son in me/ And he's related to you/ He is waiting to meet you/ He is dying to meet you." Wolfe's Unknown Rooms contain some of the same mundane menace, and it's a refreshing reminder of the horror to be mined from the good old boring everyday world.
Unknown Rooms is a short album, but its nine songs capture and sustain free-floating fear and menace. And even a few pockets of tenderness: On the quietly expansive "Flatlands", over two-finger-picked chords, Wolfe sings, "I never cared about anything you ever owned/ I want flatlands, I want simplicity/ I need your arms wrapped hard around me." On closing track "Sunstorm", Wolfe pounds two major chords on piano with brittle force, crooning, "I remember/ everything you said," until she dissolves. Unknown Rooms might be a stylistic sidestep for Wolfe, a dalliance with a simpler set-up, before she plunges back into the icy black again. But even if she goes full-on Carrie-at-the-prom next, it seems likely she'll only continue to gather force.
