Left Hip
August 2007
Author:Michael Byrne
It’s rare to find something truly unique, something that follows its own path, directed by its own heart. Yet Smolken’s new release under the pseudonym Wolfmangler (the name alone deserves credit) is just that, undoubtedly guided by its own heart; and what a dark and malevolent heart it is.
One part doom metal the other surreal minimalist folk, Wolfmangler’s ‘Cooking With Wolves’ kicks off with ‘All of You’, a brooding and subversive quasi-classical piece with violin and double bass that writhe almost in agony as a proverbial portrait of doom and decay is painted in the minds eye.
The musical theme continues with the next track, ‘Czerwony Pas’, again allowing the double bass to open the score which swiftly becomes fused with a minimal amount of drums, providing for a dark mediaeval sound, the audible equivalent of a nursery rhyme gone bad or more accurately a nursery rhyme without the glossing over of the nasty bits.
‘Compost With a Grudge’ brings a slightly more cabaret sound to the atmosphere, allowing the violin to swoon and stagger like an opium-drunk harlot in the heat of macabre Paris, while Smolken mumbles incoherently throughout, giving the piece a jazzy/surreal ambiance and all the while having a doom bass line looming just within one’s peripheral hearing.
‘Szwolezerowie’ meanwhile brings more straightforward folk doom, with a sludgy sound and sinister whispering from Smolken, creating a black mass of sound and mental imagery, while ‘Easy to Love’, despite the name, is far from a romantic melody of love and adulation but rather a elegy of doom and despair, of sinister feelings and cruel emotions.
‘She Dances’ meanwhile provides more of an acoustic feel than previous tracks, though retains the off-kilter approach to the music, and its subsequent eerie, almost threatening demeanor is still as effervescent as before, adding to the mix a bluesy southern gothic sentiment that is woven well into the album’s structure.
‘Cooking with Wolves’ (which incidentally includes tracks from an earlier EP release) is brimming with surreal, Dark Ages soundscape. If Hieronymus Bosch had made music rather than painting, then surely he would have composed something similar to this; Beelzebub’s lounge music. Enjoy now or in the next life while you’re being prodded with pitchforks over burning hot brimstone…your call.
Audiversity
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.
Bookmat
I've come to the conclusion that Wolfmangler (known to his friends as Digger Smolken, quaint huh?) is a very disturbed individual. Having recently realised that he is now old enough to legally copulate with women half his age, the Polish black metal/doom merchant has embarked on a journey into the fiery depths of temptation and glorious evil and has beckoned us to come along for the ride. 'Cooking With Wolves' is the latest in a slew of twisted lupine-related releases (including last year's incredible 'Dwelling in a Dead Raven for the Glory of Crucified Wolves') but is Smolken's first full-length on the effervescent Digitalis label. Not the most obvious fit to Brad Rose's free-folk led imprint you might think, but you'd be wrong - Rose was one of the initial champions of Smolken's output (thanks to a release on his Foxglove imprint) and listening to 'Cooking With Wolves' you realise that beneath the twisted howls of an evil genius is something with more to do with folk music than a great deal of supposed 'folk' albums. Of note is Smolken's use of traditional folk standards as the instrumental backdrop to his tracks, however he doesn't stop at merely re-interpreting old traditional songs, there's plenty more to sink into; the album opens with a 'version' of Cole Porter's 'All of You'. This though could never be your usual cover version and is Cole Porter as realised through a dense fog of acoustic doom - all bowed double bass and rasping vocals. Elsewhere we have a track made up of the words of music journalists, giving them the forked tongues you always knew they really had, but whether covers or original tracks the music fades into a haze of moonlit hatred and misanthropic funereal doom. Inscribed on the inside cover are the words 'No guitars were used in the making of these recordings' and this is an important point; although tentatively linked to the reclusive work of Burzum or more recently Nortt or Leviathan, Digger Smolken turns the black metal genre on its head by doing things totally differently. Acoustic doom was never a more fitting genre name, and although this might be a far cry from his apocryphal and metallic recordings under the Dead Raven Choir moniker (check 'Cask Strength Black Metal' if you haven't already), the sentiment is still there - kill to eat. Devastating and all encompassing music for those who stub candles out with their fingertips and keep sharpened blades handy at all times. Huge recommendation, just remember to dispose of the spade carefully when you're done, you wouldn't want them coming after you now would you?
Ink 19
Author:Matthew Moyer
What sucks about almost going blind is that you lose a lot of your enthusiasm for things you otherwise love, love, love and kind of start circling the wagons into total self-pity. What rules about almost going blind is that the only thing you can do well is listen. Hence I became completely enmeshed in Wolfmangler's blackhearted poise. Cooking With Wolves is an album that creates its own sense of time and place, so complete and fully realized, that you're left open-mouthed and gibbering, like a long shadow passed over you, and you'll perhaps not be the same again. It's such a free and unfettered and beautiful album! I keep playing it for people--and though there is at first hesitation--there is thence recognition.
Wolfmangler creates a completely original sound, eschewing guitars and other traditional rock instrumentation (check out the silver sigils proclaiming "No guitars were used in the recording of this album"), for pitch-dark meres of tense sound, created by a mix of acoustic and electric bass instruments, with what sounds like spare, woodblack percussion and the strangulated whispers and Kinski-with-throat-cancer leers of frontman/leader Smolken.
Smolken, as you may have heard, recently upped sticks from Texas and resettled in his native Poland, in the process shedding any band members that remained up to that point. Now free to explore his own eccentric visions in a very different setting, the move seems to have done him (and us) a ton of good. More emigration! The song selections are similarly puckish and inspired, traditional songs, numbers by Cole Porter and even George Gershwin get recast as the last laments of a dying mystic. The second half of the album is a reissue of an earlier CD-R release ("The Gates of Wolves")--and it shows a very different side to a young Wolfmangler, with a full ensemble in tow. The songs are a good deal fuller, utilizing more instruments, sounding like a cross between a gypsy orchestra, the Velvet Underground, and a funeral procession. The darkness isn't so total, the songs are more spry (though not, you'll understand) and there's more palpable drama--I prefer the newer stuff.
Maybe Wolfmangler bears some tertiary (and most likely coincidental) similarity to Coil, or Death in June, or--stretching it--Current 93, but little else comes to mind, honestly. It's folk music, it's chamber music, it's classical music, it's heavier than heavy doom, it's exotic, it's European, it's black metal, the soundtrack for a syphilitic royal court slowly rotting in some forgotten European city-state, it's unfathomable bleakness the likes of which Cathedral only hinted at on Forest of Equilibrium or the music of Burzum/Darkthrone/Khanate/Amber Asylum slowed and stripped to a dying crawl, forced to live out your last minutes over and over again.
Cooking With Wolves is a thing of austere, aristocratic, and consumptive beauty. It is music for soundtracking FM Murnau's lost silent films or perhaps some broken, rusted, Communist-era Marionette morality play full of murders, suicides, and old men in dark robes. You are unlikely to hear anything else come even close to the eerie menace it exudes. I have nothing but fucking praise for it.
GAZ-ETA
September 2007
Author: Tom Sekowski
Classical music made in hell? One of the most hilarious comparisons I'd read of Wolfmangler's music, though not inaccurate by any means.
Before returning to his native Poland for good, D. Smolken [formerly of Dead Raven Choir] put together this hellish exercise in molten and spiky drama. Electric basses along with acoustic ones along with Smolken's unmistakably potent, sore throat vocals are the basic ingredients in the mix. Add to this deep, cavernous aura and you've got yourself a heavy-duty blend of the deadly, serious, scary and just plain odd. Problem for one is trying to figure out just what Smolken is singing. Is he raging away in Polish or is it English? Once you listen closely, you hear individual words come into focus, though meaning of distinct tracks doesn't appear any better. If anything, the music comes close to bare sketches for a doom metal album. The spine is there, it's just the limbs in the form of a rhythm section and some guitars that are missing. Last six tracks is out-of-print "The Gates of Wolves" EP. Here, the vocals are more up-front, while the percussion in the form of a single mallet hitting a tom brings forward an even gloomier atmosphere. Equally as morose as the rest of the album, it's devastatingly cutting and just plain gloomy. Recommended for manic depressives and those who have issues keeping eyes open in broad daylight.
KZSU Zookeeper
August 24, 2007
Author: Ragnar of Ravensfjord
Bizarro, “difficult music” with cello and a wicked voice along with a few other elements. The evil voice is Smolken of the obscure but odd and proflic Polish Black Metal/Experimental band, Dead Raven Choir. These are minimal and very dark variations on “Ol’ Man River”, Cole Porter tunes and some Polish traditional folk numbers. There’s also a few originals in the mix. It takes a few spins to get all the way into but it’s worth your time.
((((1)))) Very dark & bleak. sounds like a cello + random percussion and grim vocals.
((((2)))) Tradition Polish song gone straight into the abyss. Interesting.
((((3)))) Completely undecipherable version of “Ol’ Man River”, tweaked out cello or bass strings. When he sings “I’m tired of liviiing” it’s sooo creepy!
((((4)))) Brooding, dense with vocals that range from a whisper to a slow, croaking growl.
(((5))) Not too different from #4 but in English instead of Polish.
(((((6))))) Almost a straight-forward structure, sort of folky but also continuously dark. Rather good.
((((7)))) Percussive, sullen mood.
((((8)))) Very slow and reverberating, creepiest Cole Porter cover song ever.
(((9))) Off-kilter tempo, decent goth-y vocals but it’s not all there.
(((10))) Not too different from Track #9 but with flute & later on some random.
((11)) Strummy, clunky, lo-fi folk with flute. Not awful but also not different from some random busker at the Bart station.
(((12))) Like a dark show tune, very sullen and gothy vocals and slightly dramatic flute and strings.
((((13)))) Expressive vocals with basic bits of bass and percussion
(((14))) Silly vampire folk song. Like some high school “goth folk musicial”?
Maelstrom
October 2007
Author: Chaim Drishner
Rating: 0/10
Till writing these very lines I have not yet figured out whether D. Smolken — the man behind Wolfmangler, Dead Raven Choir and Goatbomb — is a clown with serious intentions to turn the whole underground metal scene into a festival of mockery (which is fine by me, as it is not too far behind that status as it is), and consciously is doing just that with his above-mentioned, perhaps joke bands; or, that he's a serious musician with a "sweet-tooth" for the very weird faraway reaches of extreme avant-garde and unconventional, left-field music.
He could be either or neither, for all I care. The music is what counts, in the end.
Cooking With Wolves has nothing to do with music, though. It is all about random cello passages broken into endless interludes; each more senseless than the next one, or the previous one, for that matter.
Indecipherable and incoherent whispers accompany the aforementioned absurd and dissonant cello abuse — and that is pretty much all there is to it. There are no added values to be found on this recording (other than the music, which couldn't have been more absent than it is here...) and even the "experimentation" is not really that; it is more of the same senseless disharmonious anti-melody randomly executed and repeated till kingdom come.
There's no boldness here, no daring, nothing remotely in the realm of musical ideas, a plot, an atmosphere. It isn't even noise; it's without a pattern and without an aim, unless extreme annoyance is a worthy aim.
Should anyone wish to listen to a really bad cello "musician" tuning his or her instrument and / or practicing before the actual recital performance? Then by all means, pick up Cooking With Wolves and knock yourself out.
For the rest of you, no matter how open-minded you may be, stay away from this recording as if it were the black plague itself.
Metal Archives
February 2, 2008
Author: Perplexed Sjel
Rating: 0%
I've heard many a strange album, but 'Cooking With Wolves' has to be one of the strangest i've ever heard. Quite the statement and i'm not exaggerating either. Wolfmangler are just one of those bands I happened to come across and decide to check out just in case I don't miss out of finding a rare gem of the underground scene. You may be wandering, did I find a gem in Wolfmangler? No. Definitely not. I'm scratching my head wondering, if all their albums sounds identical to this one, how on earth did they make it on to a supposedly metal based website? It's a complete mystery to me.
It's difficult to know where to start with 'Cooking With Wolves' because the content is so minimal, it's unbelievable. During my phase when I was actively seeking out drone bands, I expected to come across some fairly subpar bands with minimalistic sounds, but never in my wildest dreams did I expect anything like this. So, in a sense, you could praise this album for being so intensely unique, or you could berate it for being so intensely shit. The latter works best for me. There is nothing to this album. Indecipherable vocals are fine if you've got anything to back it up with, like strong percussion or grooving bass lines, but Wolfmangler have nothing. There appears to be a time when the electric guitar and drums comes into use, but just like the cello, it has no impact. In fairness, the audience can't really hear the instrumental part over the vocals.
The vocals are incredibly tedious. They appear to be some kind of whispered rasping voice, which doesn't suit the musical content whatsoever. Considering the musical content is a cello playing all by itself, there really isn't much chance of the vocals having the slightest bit of impact, or being able to hide behind the instrumental side to things. 'Cooking With Wolves' is poor in terms of musicianship, creativity, instrumental experimentation. Believe me, the list goes on and on. The use of a cello and what appears to be the umber hulk leaves no room for error on the part of Wolfmangler. Simple fact is, the error of this album, the main one that is, is the fact that Wolfmangler recorded it. Using supposed emotive sounding instruments is probably Wolfmangler's way of creating an atmosphere so dark and eerie that fans will appreciate it's minimal approach, no such thing happens.
All in all, this has to be one of the worst albums i've ever heard. So much so, i'm about to bin it only half way through ... Don't listen to this album!
