Maybe it speaks more to my own interests to say so, but Chelsea Wolfe’s “Fight Like Gods” really sounds like Radiohead as performed by a character on HBO’s Game of Thrones; sullen, post-rock reared indie music flecked with hints of the popular fantasy show’s dark and brutal wizardry. Wolfe is an unimpressive singer, but she coaxes her lamentably adroit voice into uncomfortable and sonically dubious indiosynchracies that strike out as fresh and necessary. Guitars sound like mystical lutes and some very Jonny Greenwood-esque overdriven background rummaging reminds more of trees scratching against a dark night sky than it does of OK Computer. Which is to say nothing of the skeletal drums and the swelling haunt of string instruments. “Fight Like Gods” is overwrought in all the ways music is allowed to be overwrought; such that it is rendered a transportation – the song an exercise in world building.
