Agalloch are one of those bands that I had heard talk about in excited whispers but had never found the time to sit down and examine their works. So when I got a hold of their newest release
Marrow Of The Spirit back at the tail end of last year I was rather intrigued to say the least.
It turns out that those faceless names on the Internet were not wrong to hold this band in such high regard. Marrow Of The Spirit is a stunning release, which brings together so many disparate strands of metal, rock and folk in such a confident fashion that left me short of breath on the first listen.
Had I more time to sit down and let this album envelope me then it would have made the upper reaches of my 2010 albums of the year list. Unfortunately, I could not find the time to study this release until the beginning of the year. This is a record that demands to be listened to as a whole; it's impossible to just dip in and out as you lose the overall picture the band is painting.
And that overall picture is one of harsh realities and stark beauty played out over six tracks and sixty-five aching minutes. The band hail from Portland in the Pacific Northwest of America and it seems like they have channelled the sentiment they get from their surroundings into the music.
The intro track
They Escaped The Weight Of Darkness is a bleak, mournful cello piece by guest musician Jackie Perez Gratz, played to the backing of trickling water. It's a perfect scene setter for the chaos about to ensue as
Into The Painted Grey shocks the listener with some prime black metal blastbeats. This only lasts for a short period as the true nature of the band is revealed when the drums come to a standstill for some beautiful multi-layered guitars only for the music to swell backed to life again with a tribal sounding build up then a screeching black metal vocals that gives off a vibe of later period Enslaved.
There are so many different passages in this song's twelve minutes and so many separate feelings evoked that this review would be tripled in length if I tried to describe them all.
To put it in context, much of the music can most closely be compared to that of
Anathema. They share the Liverpudlains skill in creating stunning, soaring highs followed by melancholic lows many times in the space of one track. Unlike the recent output from
Anathema however,
Agalloch balance out their post-rock leanings with plenty of harsh passages that indicate that they still appreciate the power of metal music to convey their message.
These moments of aggression are woven into the more expansive passages with ease. There are sections when they combine the two with the harsh black metal vocals being laid over melodic, uplifting music. A perfect example of this would be on
Ghosts Of The Midwinter Fires where the piercing whisper of
"And there are no Gods here" chills the bone despite the melodic music that accompanies it.
I'm a fan of this style, bands such as Enslaved, Wolves In The Throne Room and Winterfylleth are working around similar concepts but I've never heard it done so seamlessly as on this album.
The records stand out track is it's longest,
Black Lake Nidstang clocks in at a whopping seventeen minutes and thirty-four seconds but not one millisecond seems needless or out of place. Its main melody is heartbreaking and instils a sense of great longing in the listener. Again the whispered vocals in the first verse create an uneasy atmosphere; these are then switched to an anguished cry in the second verse to great effect. The song then devolves into a throbbing prog passage for several minutes before crushing everything in its path when it kicks back into life. There is even a drum passage toward the end that's reminiscent of the beginning of Love Will Tear Us Apart by Joy
Division which is very much unexpected.
The level of inventiveness is also a testament to the quality of the band member musicianship. John Haughm and Don Anderson's guitars run the gamut of tremolo picked icy black metal guitars, atmospheric Radiohead-esque moments and tender acoustic passages. The drumming of new boy Aesop Dekker is inventive and intuitive to the music. Jason Walton's bass never does anything to spectacular but that's not really the bass's role in this band, its there to provide those extra moments of depth when needed.
The only negative thing I have to say about Marrow Of The Spirits is that its final track, the instrumental
To Drown perhaps slightly outstays its welcome. At ten minutes long it doesn't really offer anything we hadn't heard in previously and could easily have two-three minutes cut out to increase the impact of the harmonic build up at the end of the song.
This is a wonderful album that deserves wider recognition than it currently appears to be receiving. There may be some metal fans put off put the alternative/post rock ideas that the band utilises and the fact that the songs are so lengthy. But I can only admire the band for putting together an almost flawless release
Written by
Stuart Saturday, February 12, 2011
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