Review Summary: An epic masterpiece of an album from one of the best atmospheric black metal bands.
For those of you that somehow don’t know who
Agalloch is,
Agalloch is an atmospheric black-metal band with a heavy folk influence hailing from Portland, Oregon, and have garnered much praise for their previous efforts
Pale Folklore and
The Mantle.
Pale Folklore was released in 1999 with positive reviews, only to be topped by their sophomore album
The Mantle; which many consider to be their magnum opus. In my personal opinion, the follow up to
The Mantle,
Ashes Against the Grain, is a far superior album that transcends from being just an album, into a musical experience.
Tall, snowy pine trees surround the landscape for as far as the eye can see; cold chills running up your spine as snow gently glides down onto you and melts on the back of your neck. A bone chilling breeze blows gently towards you and all you can hear is the sound of nothing but a small babbling brook and the leaves of trees rustling in the distance. A dark, grey sky stretches out above you and the glow of the sun is blocked out by colossal, white clouds, darkening everything around you. This is some of the imagery one would expect from engrossing oneself into the music produced by
Agalloch; a harsh, dark, winter landscape where a potent sense of loneliness and isolation envelopes you.
The album,
Ashes Against the Grain, opens up with
Limbs which, along with the subsequent track
Falling Snow, is one of the best songs on the record. The piercing, echoing, high note of the lead guitar fades in and reverberates before the rest of the instruments collapse in and a gargantuan wave of sound floods over you. The highly distorted chords of the rhythm guitar complements the lead line playing over top everything else and help to hit on home the epic, expansive mood of the track. This song is far from being the only song to have this sort of mood or feel to it. In fact, the entire album carries this overarching image of a frigid winter landscape in the mountains of some unknown, faraway land. To some people that might be taken as a negative thing but trust me, this is actually quite an excellent aspect to the music. The album is consistent throughout, never straying too far from the mood the band is trying to capture and is devoid of any bad tracks.
Ashes Against the Grain shows
Agalloch taking a step away from the sound of their previous albums by putting more emphasis on electric guitars and mammoth, dense, encompassing riffs and passages.
Pale Folklore, and to a much larger degree,
The Mantle, had the band making more acoustic based music and utilizing subtle sounds and effects.
Ashes Against the Grain goes in the complete opposite direction. The band takes this new sound and, by some stroke of luck, manages to not have to fiddle around with it to perfect it; they get it right on the first go. As a result of that, the band creates an epic, atmospheric, masterpiece of a black metal/post-rock album that also happens to be one of my favorite albums of all time.
Ashes Against the Grain is an astounding record with a slightly new sound from a band that knows what kind of picture they want to paint to the listener, and that are able to work together in unison to capture an engrossing, dark, depressive mood. This album stands out to me, as one of the greatest atmospheric black-metal albums, and definitely the greatest piece of work
Agalloch has ever produced to date.
