Metal Musings: Agalloch
“There are no gods here”
Listen to Agalloch’s Marrow of the Spirit and, just like that, you’re strolling through the snow-lined pastures of a Robert Frost poem.
It’s not easy to explain; Agalloch is a metal band. Their vocalist is a part-time growler, other-time chanter, whisperer and, very last on the list, singer. The band means business, taking out a dark but tempered sort of rage on its abused and down-tuned instruments.
But as artists — and that’s what they are — this Oregonian fivesome care far more for the environment of their sound than whether it’s keeping heads thrashing and fists clenched. It wants you inside of it, so far within its twisted woods that once the sun sets and everything is moonlight, it’s grown too dark to follow out the bread crumbs lined behind you.
The first time I heard this band’s music, I literally couldn’t stop thinking of Hansel and Gretel.
Recorded on all analog equipment, Marrow of the Spirit plays like a record, not a CD. It has texture and grain, a low-fi and degraded kind of character. But as is the case with the rest of the band’s catalog, it’s the instrumental texturing that sets what Agalloch does apart from that of its contemporaries.
To me, there is no genre more difficult than metal. The line separating good from brutal, ominous from whiny, mature from adolescent just couldn’t be more fine. And maybe it all comes down to reserve.
Sure, there’s growling here — and, admittedly, that’s still not a device I totally “get” in music. But in Marrow, it’s just another instrument. All the while, there’s some other earthy, folk-y anchor — a guitar strum, or the echo of a woodblock, or something — grounding the piercing stabs of electric, the hisses of reverb, the relentless pulsing of bass. And then you listen to something like 2006’s brilliantly subtle and hyper-pastoral The White EP, and it’s easy to see: this band might growl, and they might drone and relish in doom, but in some strange way they do it all as a love letter to nature, in all its beautiful, horrible glory.
Take a closer look at the candy house and you’ll see it’s painted cardboard. Step inside and you’ll find the cannibal witch behind a curtain, pulling levers like Oz.
Released November of last year, Marrow of the Spirit may not be a new record, but for me it was a new kind of record. The tracks, tied together with sounds of crickets and brooks, are long — 10, 17 minutes, even — and beg to be listened to, digested and explored over and over again.
It’s rare to find metal that hates as intensely as it loves. It’s even rarer to find bands that realize, in metal, the two emotions couldn’t be more interchangeable.
Listen:
This entry was posted on Thursday, April 28th, 2011 at 9:27 pm and is filed under cd reviews, prog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
