Best New Tracks - Pitchfork

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Chelsea Wolfe: "The Waves Have Come" Posted: 21 Aug 2013 11:03 AM PDT Chelsea Wolfe's last two albums were largely defined by the constraints put on her booming, starbound vocals. 2011's Apokalypsis dunked them in sepulchral noise, while last year's Unknown Rooms: A Collection of Acoustic Songs recast her as a tasteful goth-folk auteur. They both established a pleasing atmosphere, but felt limiting all the same; you sensed her ambitions to go beyond the kohl-streaked, black-clad template and heard a voice that meant to do huge things. Or, in the words of Lionel Richie, "Why in the world would anybody put chains on me?" "The Waves Have Come" is the penultimate track of her upcoming LP Pain Is Beauty (out September 3 via Sargent House), and it makes up for lost time, with eight and a half minutes of pointedly decadent, way-over-the-top widescreen melodrama that will be insulted if you describe it as anything other than "epic." While it's unfair to say this is the sort of thing she should've been doing all along, there are very few people capable of pulling off this sort of sweet surrender, and Wolfe's realized that she's one of them. The windswept harmonies at the outset recall none other than Berlin's Top Gun makeout anthem "Take My Breath Away", while everything else's blown up to the proportions of other eight-minute outpourings of incapacitating longing that we need every few years. This is the kind of song Chelsea Wolfe was put on earth to make, before it submits to catastrophic flooding. Chelsea Wolfe: "The Waves Have Come" on SoundCloud.