Wolfmangler - "Cooking With Wolves"

Wolfmangler - Uneasy Autumn Moan (Digitalis Industries 2007)

Wolfmangler - Cooking With Wolves / Digitalis Industries

Are we the last blog on earth to hold out on mentioning wolf bands? Wasn't that whole thing like two years ago? Isn't Panther the new Horse the new Wolf? Well, whatever, consider Audiversity well and truly arrived. We're posting on a Wolf band. There. We did it. It's done. We have it now.

Except this isn't Wolf Parade or Wolf Eyes or We Are Wolves or Wolfmother. In fact, in a circuitous way, we're not really posting about wolves at all here because Wolfmangler is about as anti-wolf as a rabid Frog Eyes fan. D. Smolken is the man behind Wolfmangler, a Polish political immigrant with a knack for avoiding the cello but playing virtually everything that sounds like it. Take a song like "Ol' Man River," for example. The brooding strings you could swear are cello aren't that at all. Instead, Smolken utilizes some pretty rare instruments for not just Cooking With Wolves but also his other releases. Among them: The double bass (with bow included), the cello banjo, the electric bass, and the violin. It seems almost masochistic in a way, creating all of these dark and doomy sounds without the aid of a cello... But who are we to judge. After all, the guy's been around for a few years now and has made some consistently good releases to boot.

What's so good about Wolfmangler as a whole and Cooking With Wolves in particular now is that Smolken's music reaches out to fans of the modern avant-garde orchestral, fans of doom and sludge, and fans of folk. Smolken has cleverly tied these influences together to make a coherent album that you could, I suppose, label doom-folk. Someone has also suggested death-folk, and that's not far off either. Bottom line, it's not music that's meant to lift the spirits. The two-tone colors of his website and most album work also suggest Smolken is working within the framework of a nation that's still striving to modernize its countryside in the face of both the EU to the west and the mutilated beast of Russia's influence to the east. This isn't an overtly political album, but its feel, its intangibles that reach to the listener's mindset, suggests that Smolken's Poland has not escaped the joyless moments of its past. Ironic, then, that the first eight songs were recorded in Texas, Smolken's former residence.

Imagine the Grimm brothers living up to a name without the second 'm' and you're not far off the mark of what Wolfmangler is all about. There's an element of that medieval fairy tale gone awry scattered like ash across the barren, desolate soundscape that Smolken works hard to craft; indeed, both "Czerwony Pas" and "Szwolezerowie" are traditionals. Mission accomplished: It doesn't get much more mangled than this, but the most painful part is how slow it is, how torturously brutal and beautiful songs like "Szwolezerowie" or "Beata Z Albatrosa" are. There's just no escape. Even when Smolken breaks out with clearer, less grumbling vocals on a song like "Uneasy Autumn Moan," it only feels like his pathos is so much the larger. Around him, the instruments struggle onward.

It's a war on the ears for one hour, and at the end of "French Vampire Carol" you never feel like you've won any great battles or been vindicated for surviving. Through his work with Dead Raven Choir and Garlic Yang, Smolken has learned the art of doom and darkness. Cooking With Wolves is yet another stellar example of folk gone ghoulish. The wolf parade ends here on a cold, gray, rainy street. It may not be pretty, but it is worth watching.