Review: Chelsea Wolfe at The Rechabite

Chelsea Wolfe at The Rechabite
w/ Aphir
Wednesday, May 21, 2025

Chelsea Wolfe never fails to bring it live. With a wild production show making use of meticulous lighting design and sound, it’s the sheer heaviness of her thundering assault that sets her apart. It’s as if she once saw Nine Inch Nails live and thought, “Yes, that.”

The darkness was already looming as Aphir took the stage. The nom de plume of Melbourne producer and songwriter Becki Whitton, she brought the beats and an unusually upbeat energy for a Chelsea Wolfe show.

The lighting was subtle but atmospheric as a background of stars lit up the stage. Armed with an Ableton Push and live electronic percussion, Whitton moved between the evocative indietronica of Pomegranate Tree and more upbeat dance breaks that filled the hall impressively.

More inspiring live than her pretty (but already-impenetrable) online choral/ambient catalogue would suggest, it was a combination of manic pixie energy, dreamy songwriting and euphoric release.

If Aphir had nice production for a support, Chelsea Wolfe lifted the atmosphere noticeably, both sonically and visually. Onstage producer (and Wolfe’s main collaborator) Ben Chisholm kept the bottom end on bass guitar, along with an impressive synth setup that left no doubt as to where the stabs of white noise and fullness of sound came from.

The opening night of her Australian tour, Wolfe brought a completely different show to the one she took around the US on her most recent concert dates in late 2024. In something of an exclusive for Perth, it concentrated even more heavily on last year’s She Reaches Out to She Reaches Out to She, with nine of its 10 tracks making the cut.

Produced by TV on the Radio’s David Andrew Sitek, it already packs a doom-laden punch on record, with the trip hop touches of Tunnel Lights and Dusk making it a standout in her catalogue (apparently she was listening to a lot of Tricky). Live was another level.

Opener Whispers in the Echo Chamber started in an atmospheric swirl and ended in a thrash metal finale. House of Self-Undoing’s hectic drumming was an industrial throwback to Nine Inch Nails’ glory days.

Scattered in between were equally heavy standouts from Wolfe’s back catalogue, Carrion Flowers and 16 Psyche being the early highlights. Her Russian Circles collab, Survive, is another that never fails to impress live, while Feral Love was a climatic late-set highlight.

This assault on the senses meant that quieter moments stood out in their starkness. Place in the Sun, in particular, rose above the noise to be a piano-led, melodic tour de force; the penultimate and best track on her latest record, live, it evoked an alternate reality Pink Floyd fronted by Kate Bush. Washed in a swathe of smoke and red lighting, it segued into the climatic build of recent single Dusk in the night’s best section.

Perhaps the only disappointment was missing out on some of the classics she’s been playing at overseas shows, including arguably her best songs, The Warden and The Waves Have Come, both of which also missed the cut at the Rosemount in 2022.

But nothing about the spectacle itself was short of mesmerising, and in a nod to fans who’ve been there from the beginning, the encore focused on songs dating back to 2012 and 2011. First it was the goth-folk of breakthrough single Flatlands, followed by early epic Pale on Pale to finish, a reminder of just how deep her prolific eight-album catalogue now goes over the past 15 years.

HARVEY RAE

Photos by Stu McKay