Genre: Acoustic Funeral Doom

01 Dirge For A Viking Asshole
02 The First Elegy
03 The Death Of Geryon
04 Rise Up, Warriors
05 Words
06 Star-Winds

Wolfmangler is a side project of D. Smolken, the luxuriantly-moustachioed Pole who’s probably best known for the experimental black metal of Dead Raven Choir, and the gloriously entitled Dwelling In A Dead Raven For The Glory Of Crucified Wolves (referred to hereafter as DIADRFTGOCW) is the full-length debut from the band, released in 2006 after a few CD-Rs and Protected By The Ejaculation Of Wolves, a limited-edition split album with the British doom-meisters Moss, which appeared in 2005.

The benighted realms of black and doom metal are home to some bizarre and twisted musical extremities, but bizarre doesn’t even begin to describe Wolfmangler’s unique sound. Largely acoustic and created from classical instrumentation including bowed double-bass, bassoon, trombone, flute and timpani (there are also limited contributions from two electric basses for added bottom-end chunder), Wolfmangler’s music is ponderously slow and preposterously menacing, in a pantomime villain kind of way – I'm sure that Smolken’s moustache gets twirled a lot. All the songs on DIADRFTGOCW were recorded live at Smolken’s residence in Texas, though ‘live’ is an odd term to use for something as malodorous, mouldy and decomposing as the low, groaning, rumbling, earthen dirge-rock of Wolfmangler. (Smolken has subsequently relocated back to Poland, presumably in a box of soil.)

The album opens with "Dirge For A Viking Asshole", which is based on Edvard Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite and sounds like the aural equivalent of a funeral procession in an Edward Gorey cartoon, all murky gloom and spidery gothic flourishes. Smolken’s vocals are a throaty croak interred six feet under the absurdly bottom-heavy music – the album apparently uses texts taken from sources as diverse as the ancient Spartan poet Tyrtaeus, cult horror writer HP Lovecraft and Frank Sinatra, but no lyrics are given in the booklet, and without printed lyrics, you won’t get far with attempting to decipher Smolken’s cryptic garglings. With the big drum keeping time like the slavedriver on a Roman galley, one lengthy song after another shambles into the light at the pace of an especially slow and inefficient pack of zombies making a half-hearted attempt to eat your brains. You can practically smell the feculent stench of decay emitted by these warped and crumbling chords, a mixture of marsh-gas, bitumen, fermenting shellfish and fungal toe-jam, secreted from some unsavoury lupine territory-marking gland.

There are certain bands whose sound has elements in common with Wolfmangler. Alethes, whose sole recording to date has been Alethia, released on Glass Throat Recordings in 2002, share Wolfmangler’s acoustic doom propensities and atmosphere of organic decay. The Alethes album features percussion work by Markus Wolff, also of Blood Axis and Waldteufel, and a former member of Crash Worship, and the music of Waldteufel also tends to be slow, deep and bassy. (Markus Wolff, incidentally, also has a big moustache – hmmm, is there some kind of cause-and-effect relationship at work here?) The Austrian band Cadaverous Condition and the Belgians Silvester Anfang both produce music which can be described as ‘funeral folk’, and Silvester Anfang have also released material on the Aurora Borealis label, thus strengthening the family resemblance. The Southern Lord stable of drone bands such as Sunn0))), Boris and Earth share Wolfmangler’s gnosis of the supremacy of slowness. Ultimately, though, nothing can prepare you for Wolfmangler, and I'd suggest that you take a listen to one or two of the mp3 excerpts from DIADRFTGOCW available on both the Aurora Borealis and Dead Raven Choir websites, since something this wildly idiosyncratic is never going to fit neatly into formulaic, genre-bound expectations. And should you so happen to acquire a taste for the undeniably odd yet strangely compelling effusions of Wolfmangler, a new album, Cooking With Wolves, was released last year. There’s also a double vinyl version of Dwelling In A Dead Raven… available, which includes two extra tracks.