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Aug 18, 2015Abyss neatly encompasses the totality of her career, synthesizing the artist’s prolific catalog into her strongest and most ambitious album yet, a cavernous chasm filled with beauty, brutality, and endless possibility.
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Aug 5, 2015Ultimately, Abyss is like a nightmare. It consumes you, shows you a darkness you'd tried to keep away from, but in the cold of night, wide awake and heart-pumping you can't deny you enjoy the thrill of it.
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Aug 7, 2015The songs are long and dynamic, pushing their boundaries to the limit while maintaining spaciousness.
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Sep 8, 2015Metal is a cradle-to-grave church of the outsider; birth occurring when you first heard Black Sabbath, Slayer or Metallica. On Abyss, however, Los Angeles' Chelsea Wolfe dabbles in it, owns it, then walks away.
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Aug 17, 2015Things become a little more introspective later on, with acoustic guitars, abstract soundscapes and restrained percussive patterns taking the fore, but, thankfully, the material remains hypnotic throughout.
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Aug 7, 2015Wolfe’s act appears, from a distance, to dare that kind of cheap easy success without succumbing to its tastelessness or disposability. Abyss wins that bet across all of its 11 songs, steering close to the simple release of power chorded, full-throttle choruses but often withholding complete release.
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Aug 7, 2015More than ever, Abyss proves that she knows when to unleash her full fury and when to rein it in, and the results are stunning.
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Aug 7, 2015Despite the unsettling nature of Abyss as a whole, it’s a work that is strangely comforting once its charms are fully submitted to.
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Aug 7, 2015In lesser hands, Abyss may have collapsed under the weight of its self-seriousness. Instead, Wolfe steps into the cavernous space of her ambition and fills it with an assured collection of songs that are unsettling in their commitment to sorrow.
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Aug 6, 2015Abyss proves that there's still much work to do in the dark side of alt rock. Chelsea Wolfe is surely ahead of the curve.
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UncutJul 30, 2015Though Abyss' quieter moments are plenty chilling,m Wolfe's brand of anguish best suceeds when she's out to do serious damage. [Sep 2015, p.83]
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MojoJul 30, 2015Abyss is a darkly compelling tour de force. [Sep 2015, p.94]
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Jul 30, 2015No matter how aggressive the instrumentation, the music always manages to push things forward, as showcased by the avant-orchestral finale, "The Abyss."
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Aug 6, 2015Abyss, like any Wolfe album, is a vast and immersive sonic universe, and her deepest and most personal yet.
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Jul 30, 2015Abyss terrifies from start to finish, the haunting work of a twisted genius in her prime.
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Aug 17, 2015Despite the weak ending, Wolfe brings a chaotic, engulfing sound that makes this one of her heaviest works yet.
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Aug 17, 2015However, as depressing as this might read on paper, Abyss has been constructed by Wolfe and co-writer Chisholm with meticulous care and awareness, making it not only her tightest LP to date but also much more enjoyable than its submissive melancholy has any right to be.
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Aug 12, 2015Throughout Abyss, Wolfe uses her pain as a powerful tool, revealing the beauty underneath it.
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Aug 11, 2015Abyss may not be a go-to for either late-night or summer listening, but it ably solidifies Wolfe’s presence as a devastatingly unique voice in our current musical climate.
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Aug 11, 2015One never gets the impression that she's battling against or drowning within her riptides; instead the vocals and guitars assume a kind of subservient relationship, the voice somehow calling, from out of the void, the raging whorl.
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Aug 5, 2015Abyss weighs unnecessarily heavy at times--the obvious premise and barely-there smack drum of “Simple Death” doesn’t hold up against the other songs’ more nuanced examinations of the macabre subjects--but Wolfe makes a convincing case to follow her into the underworld.
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Aug 7, 2015The downside of all this bombast is that the album, taken as a whole, can feel ponderous.
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Aug 14, 2015Despite the overarching quality of the album, its continual, dirge-like range of instrumentation can become a little stifling and songs risk blending into one another.
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Aug 6, 2015It’s a challenging album, one you might not put on often.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 48 out of 52
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Mixed: 2 out of 52
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Negative: 2 out of 52
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Aug 8, 2015
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Aug 29, 2015
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May 7, 2017