Why Wolves in the Throne Room is the best live show I've ever been to

For those of you who don't know what a full stack is, let me insert a brief prologue here before I jump into this concert review. The full stack is the definition of heavy metal. The definition of loud. A full stack consists of two amplifier cabinets and an amp head. Marshall, pioneers of such a set-up, are still closely associated with the full stack. 1980s NWOBM band Raven even wrote a song called "The Ballad of Marshall Stack". When you see how sexy a Marshall full stack looks, you definitely understand why someone would write a song in tribute to it:



Oh baby.

When I saw the members of Wolves in the Throne Room carrying three of these full stacks out onto the stage of the tiny Oak Street Speakeasy here in Eugene, Oregon, I felt my heart rate increase a bit. When they turned out all the lights and started lighting candles onstage, I smiled. When they started playing, my heart stopped.

For the first time in my life, I felt as though sound was a physical presence. The intensity, the reverb, the volume, they all culminated in a sort of sonic gel that just enveloped me in a thick paste of Black Metal.

There was so much sound that I heard new songs within the competing harmonic frequencies and the faster I thrashed my head the more I created my own rhythm of sound pulsing into my ears and out again--moving the gel of sound in and out of my brain.

I realized about 20 minutes in that I had curled my hands into claws and was reaching them to the sky, as if I were trying to grasp something in the heavens. I stared at my own hands, shocked that they seemed to be moving on their own. And when I looked around I saw that I was not the only one who was clawing at the air. We were a seething mass of destructive people, our claw hands elevated in some sort of demonic rapture.

Everything is right with the world now. I cannot be mad at any other human. Wolves in the Throne Room calls their music "Cleansing Black Metal." I see why. We are all one within the gel of sound and our anger collected and was cleansed into the sky, never to be heard from again.