Folk metal. Not two words you’d expect to find in that order. Typically coming from regions in northern Europe, Scandinavia and Norway and the like, and dealing with themes of paganism, Vikings, glorious battle, and the black plague. Very, very popular and prominent in the areas that it’s from, folk metal has not really broken into the American audience very successfully. Which makes it rather interesting to discover that Agalloch is from Seattle which, if you’ve completed the second grade will know to be nowhere near Europe at all.
Agalloch has been around for fifteen years now, and Marrow of the Spirit is the latest release, totaling four full-length albums and seven EP’s. Clearly there’s some significant back-catalogue for this record to live up to. So, can it?
Yes, mostly. One thing irks me right away, however. Historically, Agalloch is not a metal band in the ‘loud and fast’ sense, leaving the slow, plodding pace of their music and the empty and hopeless lyrics to amass the proper brutality and power that other bands don’t have to worry about because they’re tripping over their double bass pedals and guitar solos. So picture my displeasure when Into the Painted Grey opens with… forty seconds of blast beats. The real shame here is, that while the instruments (most notably the guitar) are playing as fast as they possibly can be, the runs of tremolo picking last just as long as a typical riff’s slower playing would. It just feels like they’ve written a very nice introduction to their song and somewhere along the line decided to stuff it full of as many notes as possible. Just doesn’t jive so well with the rest of the album.
The rest of the album is par for the course: Agalloch's inspiration comes from the massive, expansive forests of the American northwest, and their music is their attempt to capture the desolation and sinister mysteries that could lurk in the shadows of the hills. Lyrics like these, from the seventeen-minute Black Lake Nidstang really capture the supernatural glow of their music.
Where have all the noble cranes gone?
Where have all the stags disappeared to?
Piled below in the tomb of this burdened pool
a curse to those who corrupt these sacred woods
a curse to those who taste this solemn water
Marrow is by and large a very risk-free album for the band, save for those stupid blast beats. All the set pieces are here: old, rusty sounding acoustic guitars, fuzzy distortion, big, dissonant open chords and half-whispered, half-screamed vocals. One interesting touch this time around is that the entire album was recorded and mized in analog, on old equipment from a few decades ago to give the music the same slightly rough, slightly unpolished beauty as the forests it's written for. And it works very well, because even though it's not up to the same standard of quality as the music we're used to listening to , this album isn't nice, clean I-IV-V rock music either. It's ugly and it's rough, and a fittingly ugly, rough final cut is appropriate.
If you're into Agalloch, this new release will not disappoint you. NPR (of all groups) put this in their top 50 albums of 2010, and Decibel Magazine crowned it as the single best album of the year. So check it out if these merits impress you, or if you're still wondering what exactly this 'folk metal' crap is all about.
