Agalloch: The Serpent & The Sphere

AGALLOCH: THE SERPENT & THE SPHERE (2014)

1) Birth And Death Of The Pillars Of Creation; 2) (Serpens Caput); 3) The Astral Dialogue; 4) Dark Matter Gods; 5) Celestial Effigy; 6) Cor Serpentis; 7) Vales Beyond Dimension; 8) Plateau Of The Ages; 9) (Serpens Cauda).

After a four-year pause, briefly interrupted only once with the one-track EP Faustian Echoes (on which they tried combining music with an actual Goethe recital and film soundtrack samples, to no major success), Agalloch are finally back to deliver, as you might have guessed, another very much Agalloch album. This time the vague concept behind the songs is even grander than before, switching from issues of decay and extinction of the human race to the birth and death of the Uni­verse itself, apparently imagined in the shape of the Great World Serpent, so if regular cosmology is too boring or difficult for you, feel free to take a sixty-minute crash course on the basic model of the universe from these guys.

The problem is, if you raise the conceptual stakes so high, you should probably be prepared to extract the adequate high cards from your sleeve — and yet, so it seems, this band is still not willing to go far beyond the deuce, if you know what I mean. Four massive LPs into their career, we are now perfectly aware of all the regular trademarks of Agalloch, and The Serpent & The Sphere adds nothing whatsoever to their usual bag of tricks. On the contrary, it subtracts: for in­stance, there are no more traces of clean vocals (have they gotten death threats from serious fans or what?), the instrumentation is very basic (no strings and very few keyboards), and the song tempos, which used to range from «very slow» to «mid-tempo», all tend to drift towards «mid-tempo» now, leaving less room for the subtle, gradual unfurling of the atmospheric canvas.

When you contrast this mysterious self-limitation with a bombastic song title like ʽBirth And Death Of The Pillars Of Creationʼ, this sort of blows out a brain circuit. True, Agalloch never positioned themselves as a major experimental outfit, preferring to test the possibilities of a set formula rather than blow the formula itself to smithereens. Even Marrow Of The Spirit, disap­pointing as it was in general, had itself a bit of testing (the cello intro alone was an unusual move by any accounts). But The Serpent & The Sphere, despite its lyrical ambition, after a few lis­tens remains the first Agalloch album that gives a sharp impression of «regress» rather than «pro­gress», even according to Agalloch's own limited standard.

The bulk of the album is given over to these burly mid-tempo romps that we all know very well by now — two or three guitars woven together in droning / folksy-jangly manners, driven for­ward by a huge drum sound and occasionally accompanied by John Haughm's whispered or growled (more often, whispered and growled) vocals. Describing them is impossible and useless (they tried doing it over at Pitchfork and came out with descriptions like «flickering notes stab­bing at distended riffs and pristine tones countering sheets of distortion», which, if you stare at them long enough, could equally well apply to, say, the Rolling Stones, for example). All I can ask myself is — does any of these riffs and tones exceed the average expectations? And the an­swer is a strict no all the way.

The longest and probably «crucial» number on the album, the twelve-minute instrumental ʽPla­teau Of The Agesʼ, only matches its title, I think, if there was nothing much happening on that particular plateau throughout the ages (which, come to think of it, might very well be the actual fate of most plateaus). A completely predictable, safely played set of crescendos, mainly based on a series of ascending trills the likes of which have been produced a miriad times already — just compare this to something like ʽIn The Shadow Of Our Pale Companionʼ, with its memorable main theme, a series of melodic jumps that were impossible to preview, and a certain sense of exuberance from an ambitious young band that had just picked up the scent of something not completely, but noticeably different. ʽPlateau Of The Agesʼ — and everything else on here — is the same band going through the motions, seemingly bent more on creating a «metaphysical ins­tallation» than music that would continue to be interesting. No steam.

The songs are linked together with three short instrumentals, whose Latin titles refer to the head, heart, and tail of the Serpent — three chrono-spatial parts of the Universe? — but here, too, the curious conceptual idea is realized with three boring acoustic interludes, consisting of the same types of scales and arpeggios that Agalloch themselves and everybody else have already explored many times in the past. Come on now, wouldn't we expect just a little extra thrill from the con­secutive appea­rance of the head, heart, and tail of the Serpent? How about at least using three different instruments, or something?

Probably some songs are slightly more creative than others, but, honestly, I do not have the strength to drag them all under the analytical microscope. Long-term fans of the band have in­deed praised the album, and, since it swears such stark loyalty to the formula, if you really love Agalloch for the atmosphere, you will not be disappointed. If you love Agalloch for the riffs and memorable melodies, you might be a little disappointed (I didn't manage to memorize anything, but maybe it's just me). But if you love Agalloch for pushing boundaries of the genre, stay away. The only thing that will be pushed here is your patience; and mine has been pushed hard enough to get all pissed off and leave here with a mean thumbs down. Will be seeing you 'round about three years on, gentlemen, and please don't forget to bring back the cello at least.

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Agalloch: Marrow Of The Spirit

AGALLOCH: MARROW OF THE SPIRIT (2010)

1) They Escaped The Weight Of Darkness; 2) Into The Painted Grey; 3) The Watcher's Monolith; 4) Black Lake Niðstång; 5) Ghosts Of The Midwinter Fires; 6) To Drown.

We have cello. Why didn't we have cello before? Cello goes down real easy with Agalloch, and suits their moods just as fine as acoustic guitars and harps. Cello can be lots of things, but it is typically somber / evening / winter-autumn style, and that's Agalloch for you. The relatively brief intro is nearly all cello, and then it reappears again on the last track, the one that informs you that "They escaped the weight of darkness to drown in another".

Unfortunately, apart from the cello use, there is no real progress. We just fall back on more of the same black metal and folk metal compositions, five huge epic tracks in a row without any brea­thing space. Fortunately, these epic tracks do not show any drop-off in quality, either: loyal Agal­loch fans have no serious reasons for disappointment. Only loyal Agalloch reviewers may have those reasons, since, clearly, it is very hard to write anything other than «Hey, cool, these guys are still going strong!» about Marrow Of The Spirit.

So I will be brief, concentrating only on the fact that 'Black Lake Niðstång' is currently the long­est track in the band's catalog (beaten only by 'Our Fortress Has Burned To The Ground', but that was a special case that don't count), and this would most likely mean that it is their strongest can­didate for «That single Agalloch masterpiece to trump all other Agalloch masterpieces». I do not see it as being nearly as successful in covering all of the band's strong points as 'In The Shadow Of Our Pale Companion', though — for one thing, most of the vocals are in the death metal vein, for another, there is little, if any, evidence of their mastery of the acoustic sound. Instead, there is a lot of keyboards here, from bells and chimes to distorted organs and sci-fi synths — which they put to good atmospheric use, but it's still not quite the same thing.

The most concise and successful thing on the album, in my opinion, is its shortest song (bar the intro), 'Ghosts Of The Midwinter Fires', which starts out similar to a suicidal Cure anthem, then gradually morphs into generic black metal mode, and finally makes the simple transition to a shrill-ecstatic prog-rock anthem with blazing guitar solos. It's nothing particularly special or even pretentious (by Agalloch standards), just a well-produced, well-meaning song that I have singled out, perhaps, exactly for the reason that there is so little to single out within it. Yet I certainly prefer its finely-tailored sound to, for instance, the sonic chaos that opens 'Into The Painted Grey'. Maybe it's a good thing these guys don't beat around the bush so much. In this land of eternal win­ter that they have created, any attempt to thaw their glaciers will mean nothing but senseless, devastating deluge.

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Agalloch: The White

AGALLOCH: THE WHITE (2008)

1) The Isle Of Summer; 2) Birch Black; 3) Hollow Stone; 4) Pantheist; 5) Birch White; 6) Sowilo Rune; 7) Summer­isle Reprise.

This ends up looking like an appendix, an antidote of sorts to the overdose of heaviness on Ashes: a thirty-minute EP of mostly acoustic-based compositions completely bent on atmosphere rather than crunch. (Technically, it is a «companion» to the band’s earlier The Gray EP, but that was basically just a throwaway, consisting of lengthy «deconstructed» remakes of ‘The Lodge’ and ‘Odal’, the former unnecessary and the latter awful — transformed into a wall of metal machine muzak noise. The White, on the other hand, honestly functions as a fully realized offering).

The opening kiddie chant (“We carry death out of the village!”), as well as bits of dialog in the end and the ‘Isle Of Summer’ motive, all stem from the band’s fascination with 1973’s cult hor­ror classic, The Wicker Man. Watching the movie, with its cartoonish nigtmarification of «Celtic» pagan practices, may help make The White more impressive, but this is not a soundtrack — the movie is pretty violent, but this here music is simply deep and dark without explicit aggression.

Since there is virtually nothing to headbang to, this is Agalloch’s most ambient-sounding creation so far; the only tune that seems to have been written with development and sonic travel in mind is ‘Sowilo Rune’, which incorporates some shrill, ecstatic electric guitar work and thick keyboard backgrounds to illustrate all the dangers of the letter S, from overestimating the power of the Sun God to, perhaps, its shiny representation on the uniform of a Schutzstaffel officer? Who knows. The other tracks just range from relatively simple acoustic meditations (‘Isle Of Summer’), some­times also modestly electrified in the middle (‘Birch Black’) to key­board-generated howling winds and shrieking ghosts (‘Hollow Stone’) to minimalist piano (‘Summerisle Reprise’): plea­sant, but nothing we hadn’t already experienced before.

In the end, what remains the most memorable aspect of the album is the incorporation of the Wi­cker Man bits — up until now, Agalloch have always behaved in a medievalistic manner, but this time around, they really push the impression that they dedicate their art to the idea of resurrecting the old beliefs, or, perhaps, the idea that this resurrection is just round the corner and that it goes hand in hand with the Apocalypse. God is dead, man is a rotten slaughterer, that sort of thing. The idea is about as old as the Christian church itself, but here they have chosen a subtle, unintrusive, «indirect» way of expressing it, and it almost works — and even if Christopher Lee’s dialog sam­ples are as embarrassingly worded as every bit of Christopher Lee’s dialog in any of his B-mo­vies, it is still frickin’ Christopher Lee. Thumbs up.

Agalloch: Ashes Against The Grain

AGALLOCH: ASHES AGAINST THE GRAIN (2006)

1) Limbs; 2) Falling Snow; 3) This White Mountain On Which You Will Die; 4) Fire Above, Ice Below; 5) Not Un­like The Waves; 6) Our Fortress Is Burning... I; 7) Our Fortress Is Burning... II. Bloodbirds; 8) Our Fortress Is Bur­n­ing... III. The Grain; 9*) Scars Of The Shattered Sky (Our Fortress Has Burned To The Ground).

Somewhat of a step down here; four years of studio non-presence, apart from a handful of not very diagnostic EPs, do not seem to have done much good for the proud Oregon disciples of Sca­ndinavian thunder and ice wizards. Not only has there been very little progress in their musical education, but Ashes even seems to trade back some of the achievements of The Mantle, and for what? Es­sentially, for a return to a much more hardcore-metallic sound — almost as if they were afraid lis­tening to The Mantle might make some of us forget the band's true pedigree.

The results of their cutting down on acoustic compositions and interludes, as well as clean vocals, are obvious: most of the songs sound totally alike. The basic range now is not from dark folk to heavy folk-metal, but rather from heavy folk-metal to songs that dangerously border on «old school metal»: the main riff of 'Not Unlike The Waves', for instance, is near-genuine Metallica. Haughm, in an interview, called that number "the perfect representation of Agalloch in 2006"; if that is truly so, I am not overjoyed. As for the first four tracks, I simply cannot find any new words to describe them — it suffices to conclude, from what I have just stated, that this is ge­ne­rally the same Agalloch as before, but rendered sli­gh­tly less atmospheric due to more emphasis on the heaviness and less on the subtlety.

For me, the album does not even begin properly until the final suite, the three-part 'Our Fortress Is Bur­ning' — where 'Our Fortress' is, of course, the predictable medieval allegory for 'Our Ho­me­world' the burning of which we are invited to contemplate through folk-metallic eyeglasses. Most of the atmospheric highlights are concentrated in these three parts, from the gently minima­listic piano intro to the weeping drone of the first guitar-based part to the epic-romantic solo of 'Bloodbirds' to the avantgarde representation of the world's collapse in 'The Grain', where Hau­ghm's guitar strives to achieve an effect comparable to that of Hendrix's on 'Star Spangled Ban­ner' — saddle the capacities of the electric sound to make them represent man's (or, in this case, nature's) eternal suffering. Unlike the preceding tracks, this suite strives for something more gran­diose, and with Agalloch's overall qualifications, it's quite successful. It might also be useful to check out the limited expanded edition of the album, which adds a twenty-minute long coda that sounds like one of those chilly soundtracks to action games that take place in post-nuclear envi­ronments: a demolished, lonesome world whose only sounds are the ones left to us by shards of human civilization swaying in the cold wind.

In short, strange as it may seem, it is the non-melodic parts of this album that seem to constitute its biggest attraction, speaking out louder, more overtly, and with more meaning than the straight­forwardly metallic parts. Hardly a thrilling realisation for the typical metal fans (Haughm said that many of them considered 'The Grain' part of 'Fortress' as filler, whereas in reality the whole suite had been built around that part), but a saving grace for those who prefer the art side of the band. On 'Fortress', Agalloch really press forward, switching from a mostly «white and gray» pa­norama of The Mantle to a «gray and black» one — charred, crackling, and smoking. In the pro­cess, they retain their crown as America's kings of impending doom, but only barely. Altogether, the presence of 'Fortress' still guarantees a thumbs up, yet, in my opinion, the often-heard victo­rious wails of «another Agalloch masterpiece!» are exaggerated all the same.

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Agalloch: The Mantle

AGALLOCH: THE MANTLE (2002)

1) A Celebration For The Death Of Man...; 2) In The Shadow Of Our Pale Companion; 3) Odal; 4) I Am The Woo­den Doors; 5) The Lodge; 6) You Were But A Ghost In My Arms; 7) The Hawthorne Passage; 8) ...And The Great Cold Death Of The Earth; 9) A Desolation Song.

I take it as no coincidence that it is today, right on the very day that I set out to write about Aga­l­loch's most acclaimed album, that we got our first serious winter snowfall, and it is still falling out of the murky grey skies right as I type out these words. Now all we need to do is replace the boring urban window view with pine forests on mid-size hills, populate them with a bunch of world-weary, disgruntled ghosts, and then the picture and the sound will be as one.

The Mantle is Agalloch at their very best simply because it is the one album, so far, in their ca­reer that has them doing their thing and their thing only. Death metal clichés are reduced to an ab­solute minimum, in fact, it may not even be correct to call this thing «metal» at all — very few songs have the required crunchy heavy riffs, being driven instead by loud acoustic strum, stern and morose, but still somewhat color­ful electric leads, and, occasionally, pianos, accordeons, even mandolins. The growling vocals are still there, sometimes, but much more often give way to clean-sung lines or are presented as ominous, mood-setting whispering rather than the usual «hey, who let Ronnie James Dio gobble ten pounds of ice cream on a cold winter day?» variety.

One element of the band's schtick has by now crystallized to perfection, and it may not be to everyone's tastes: they display a strong passion for LAM(B?) — Long, Atmospheric, Monoto­nous (and Boring?). If an Agalloch composition crawls on for 10 or 15 minutes, do not expect an Abbey Road-style multi-part suite. There will be some key changes along the way, some alter­nations between quiet and loud, some traces of fade-outs and crescendos, but overall, what you get in the beginning is not too different from what you get in the middle, and almost absolutely the same as what you get in the end. This is an ambient approach, and you have to cope with it.

Not that it's unexpected. This is, after all, music for people who like taking long walks in snow-covered forests, and how is a snow-covered forest that much different at the start of your walk from the snow-covered forest at the end of it? (Unless you're lucky enough to end up swallowed by a grizzly bear, of course, which, I suspect, is like that particular ideal ending insinuated by Agal­loch on each of their records, but always remaining unrealized at the end). It is one thing when a seventy-minute long album takes that much time only in order to mask the paucity of its ideas ­— but Agalloch found a great way out of it: sure, they do not have a lot of different ideas, but the ideas they do have are the ones that, by their very nature, require a lot of running time.

'In The Shadow Of Our Pale Companion' is arguably the perfect Agalloch number, conveying the band's essence so damn well that everything else almost ends up sounding like last-minute varia­tions on the magnum opus. There is a metallic roar running through its main melody, but it does not initiate the melody, which consists of a mournful electric drone, a simple acoustic accompani­ment, and a minimalistic medieval mandolin pattern, woven together so carefully that Mother Nature could hardly wish for a more suitable mourning anthem for itself. Vocals come as growls, as dark quasi-Gregorian harmonies, as underground demon recitative, as half-spoken bardic poet­ry, whatever suits the moment best. Guitar solos start coming in no earlier than the tenth or ele­venth minute, in the usual minimalist form. Harmonies are overdubbed with so much craft that it is hard to believe it is the same band that, just a few years ago, engaged in little vocal work other than just vomiting the words out into the microphone.

It's not all pure «fantasy world», either — like most of the album's tunes, the song is ecologically minded. On The Mantle, Agalloch seem to exert more care in making us believe this whole mu­sical and lyrical approach is not just the result of reading too many third-rate fantasy novels and yearning for the innocence of an era in which you could fall upon your sword in the middle of a dark forest and have a beautiful ballad written about it. They want to merge that imagery and tho­se values into the present. Think King Arthur, Siegfried, and Beowulf transported in a time mach­ine into the 21st century — then, in the words of Jim Morrison, our first eco-minded bard, «look what they've done to the Earth, look what they've done to our fair sister» etc. etc.

That's one aspect that doesn't really work, but it makes great fodder for the press, who now has a legitimate reason for respecting the band and tolerating the intolerable, that is, the arrogant du­ra­tion and similarity of their atmospheric pieces. Obviously, I cannot discuss them individually. If you yearn for a more openly metallic sound, 'I Am The Wooden Doors' and 'You Were But A Ghost In My Arms' will provide the heavy riffage you need, but the last twenty-five minutes are all solidly folk-based, particularly 'The Great Cold Death' with its near-gorgeous vocal part and 'A Desolation Song' with its accordeon-and-mandolin-led melody.

But then, honestly, it does not matter; Agalloch make a point of blurring the line between folk and metal, right down to where, at some point, you no longer feel like you are having a «folk» or «metal» experience at all, but are simply listening to some extreme form of a Requiem Mass — "Celebration For The Death Of Man", indeed. I am not going to pretend to being in some per­verse love relation with The Mantle, or even to «getting» it the way we're supposed to get it. I am not going to say it fully justifies its length (had they cut out, for instance, the eleven minutes of 'Hawthorne Passage', the album would still retain its full potential). I certainly do not insist that it cannot be accused of cheesiness — some of the lyrics are generically cringeworthy, and some of the darkness, as befits this genre, feels artificially bloated. And it is rather obvious that if you fall upon this from a purely metal background, the technical accomplishment of John Haughm and company will seem puny next to their Scandinavian forefathers.

But The Mantle, much more so than Folklore, makes that somewhat primitive bluntness of the band's approach into their chief advantage. Many people can run up and down all sorts of scales; how many have thought of concentrating, instead, on enveloping your living quarters in an impe­netrable atmosphere of folk-metallic ambience? 'In The Shadow...' is supposed to leave you mes­merized rather than aggressively overwhelmed, and I believe that it achieves its goal, along with most of the other songs on here. Well, it looks like it's finally stopped snowing, so I may as well just issue the expected thumbs up and let us move on from here.

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Agalloch: Pale Folklore

AGALLOCH: PALE FOLKLORE (1999)

1) She Painted Fire Across The Skyline, Pt. 1; 2) She Painted Fire Across The Skyline, Pt. 2; 3) She Painted Fire Ac­ross The Skyline, Pt. 3; 4) The Misshapen Steed; 5) Hallways Of Enchanted Ebony; 6) Dead Winter Days; 7) As Em­bers Dress The Sky; 8) The Melancholy Spirit.

Since The United States Of Jazz, Blues, and Country had never been a major player on the «ex­treme fantasy metal» scene — one area almost totally monopolized by Scandinavian countries — it is not difficult to understand the sometimes too heavy aura of promotion that surrounds Agal­loch, a band hailing from Portland, Oregon. These guys have dared to challenge none other than Finland's Amorphis, Norway's Ulver, and Sweden's mighty Opeth — and the very fact that they can do it without thoroughly embarrassing themselves almost automatically makes them critical darlings (for the metal press, at least).

There still may be a big difference, though. Pale Folklore, Agalloch's full-length debut (preceded only by some demo tapes that are said to be far more derivative), is unquestionably influenced by and constantly evokes Scandinavian metal schools, but if most of those bands perform dark metal with elements of folk, Pale Folklore is dark folk with elements of metal. Or, rather, it is what a black minstrel with laryngeal cancer would sound like if someone tuned down his lute and ran it through a distortion pe­dal.

For one thing, the guitarists, John Haughm and Don Anderson, almost never solo. This may be due to technical limitations (must be hard to get a proper Swedish guitar teacher in Oregon), or may be a conscious, self-restraining decision, but the fact is that Agalloch's music is riff-based something like 95% of the time (and the rest of it mainly consists of howling winds or tolling bells, or, sometimes, brief piano interludes). This can get tiresome, since the riffage is usually of the «drone» variety, and unless you pay lots and lots of attention, all of these drones tend to mer­ge together in one huge mega-drone. In this respect, Agalloch may have more in common with noise rock bands like ...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead than with their Viking brothers-in-arms.

But if it doesn't exactly pay off in terms of memorability and even «discernibility», it works fine in the atmosphere department. Carefully avoiding most of the cheesy aspects of Nordic music (militant paganism, church-burning, horned helmets, Valhalla awaits us, all that nonsense that keeps Wagner permanently rotating in his grave), they concentrate on themes of world-weariness and round-the-corner death, the ones that go down so well with a bit of grey cloudy skies, snow-covered pine forests, and icy wind blasts. Obviously, an icy wind blast opens the record as such — what else? And the strange bagpipe-imitating drone that even­tually morphs into an even stran­ger «scratchy» pattern immediately sets the right atmosphere.

Except for a relatively brief, equally winterish, instrumental 'The Misshapen Steed', a rapidly shifting palette of sorrowful piano melodies, weeping woodwinds, mystical harps, and funebral or­chestration, all of the songs are heavy riff-fests, usually with one guitar providing the thick, stern dro­ne and another laying a more distinctive, note-based melody. They are all extremely si­milar, but different enough to leave a folk metal fan further interested in sorting them out and as­cribing tiny mood swings to each successive track. Tempos range from mid- to moderately fast, and the rhythm section cooks well: stuff like 'Hallways Of Enchanted Ebony' has serious head­banging potential. Of course, we are occasionally sidetracked into acoustic interludes (many of them combining sharp precision with sincere loveliness), and there are a few completely un­ex­pected surprises — U2-ish scratch-delay-patterns on 'The Melancholy Spirit', for instance — but diversity was hardly a major goal here.

Unfortunately, adopting various superficial trappings of their predecessors also means that most of the lyrics are delivered in a generic black metal growl; on one hand, this may be an advantage since we do not get to discern the spoken words (the album opens with "Oh dismal mourning, I open my weary eyes once again, my life has been left hollow and ashes have filled the gorge of my within" and the rest never strays too far away from that tragic realization), but, on the other hand, this is the major obstacle that can prevent one from taking this whole stuff seriously. It is one thing if the entire work of art transparently adopts Dungeons & Dragons as its ideal, but Aga­l­loch seem serious about creating a darkly beautiful musical landscape, so why should it be spoilt rotten with this «Cookie Monster caught a rhinovirus» sonic idiocy? (The other vocal trapping — little bits of female opera vocals on climactic bits of some of the tracks — works perfectly fine, in comparison).

Apart from that, and the fact that, from each new outburst of US critic adoration you have to sub­tract the unseen, but suspected bit of national pride bias, Pale Folklore is a pretty damn good re­cord to play. Especially if all of your relatives have died (preferably, in horrible accidents or af­ter long and painful struggles with incurable illnesses), if life has no meaning whatsoever, and if you are financially fit to go on an Alpine vacation. Don't forget to bring Pale Folklore along. The line "From which of this oak shall I hang myself?" sounds especially delicious in such a context, pro­vided you can make it out from the growls. Thumbs up.

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