I strolled into The Sinclair Sunday evening as it was starting to fill up for True Widow, no rx quickly realizing my poor outfit choice of a Justin Timberlake/Jay Z shirt for essentially a metal show. Maybe if it was studded I would have gotten by without weird looks?
True Widow are a three-piece drone metal band which I can say is not my usual musical taste, but I found myself grooving along to the beats. They possess a shoegaze vibe, not moving around much on stage and playing their music to perfection. The vocals were lost behind the fuzzy, deep bass, but maybe that is what they were going for, because the feedback progressed through the evening as its own instrument at times. Listening to the guitar riffs, I got vibes of Speedy Ortiz’s fuzzy riffs on “MKVI.”
After True Widow, Chelsea Wolfe took the stage. It hadn’t been too long since Chelsea Wolfe performed at The Sinclair, although last time, it was acoustic. Her band came out before her to start things off in a fuzzy slow drone haze in darkness. The lights came up a bit in a spotlight where Chelsea Wolfe planted in the middle of the stage donning a bright white sash over an all-black outfit. At this moment, I knew the evening would be a spiritual performance. Wolfe’s eyes pierced the audience through dark black eye shadow, and I was excited in the most frightened way.
Chelsea Wolfe’s newest album, Pain is Beauty, came out just about two weeks before the show, so she played many songs off of it to support it, mixed in with older tracks and fan favorites. When Wolfe addressed the crowd, she sounded more earnest than most musicians. She thanked everyone from her fellow musicians to the crew and fans out in The Sinclair for all of her successes thus far. Although not usually a metal fan, I have a special spot in my heart for Wolfe’s metal-like version of folk which I’ve heard best described as “folk noir.” Her music is spiritual-sounding, like church but 1000X better. It makes me nostalgic for PJ Harvey in their nineties prime, and I left feeling enlightened and ready for the Monday-Friday routine of work. 
