Review Summary: Falloch find their own.
I never understood the outright hate that Falloch got with Where Distant Spirits Remain. It was fairly forgettable, but far from outright vile. Insofar as it was clear Agalloch worship (right down to the name sharing far too many sequential letters for comfort), it was at least moderately well executed, and the band showed a lot of promise if they would just shed the trappings of the style they seemed far too eager to imitate.
Well, after one of the two original band members left and the remainder hired him a whole new lineup, Falloch's sound has changed. Is it for the better? Oh my yes.
Gone are the days of atmospheric black metal paint by numbers, Falloch has settled into a new sound that, frankly, is a little hard to define. It's got a smattering of post rock and post metal here, a bit of black metal there, some progressive sprinkled around and plenty of old folky bits to spice it up, but put on the spot to quickly explain what TI,OF sounds like... I'm at kind of a loss. It's "heavy" in the sense that the riffs are big and it uses fast drumming, but this isn't mosh pit heavy. This isn't headbang heavy. Acoustic guitars spring up but don't signify that the song is going soft at that point. One of Falloch's favorite tricks, indeed, is using their biggest and heaviest riffs with the most melodic vocal lines.
What TI,OF has that WDSR lacked is cohesion. Instead of sounding like a pot of all the tropes and trappings of a genre being used because, well, they're SUPPOSED to be used, each element serves the greater whole. These are still long tracks, four of them clocking over nine minutes, but they move and swell, ebb and flow the way songs of that length should go. These tracks aren't long due to nonstop repetition of a single guitar lick until you're so sick of it you want to reach through your headphones into the past and slap the band upside the head for thinking that song length and quality are directly linked. Rather, they're lengthy because they have several movements, riffs build upon themselves, later passages of tracks are callbacks to earlier.
Special attention needs to be given to vocalist Tony Dunn. This man's voice is simply gold. I've heard criticisms of Falloch that their music lacks a soul or genuine emotion of its own, but I cannot fathom how this is the case with the performance Dunn gives. His voice soars, layered and harmonized at times, bringing a haunting and ethereal character to instrumentation that, without it, would sound closer to standart post-metal. For anyone to listen to "Brahan" and come away saying Falloch has no soul to their music would leave me wanting to know exactly what constitutes "soul" in music. The composition to it represents everything this style can do but rarely does. It's not dark and grim, nor is it uplifting. It's more like staring into the grand canyon or watching a star go supernova, that feeling of awe.
The instrumentation and production are similarly spot on. If you're listening to these albums through Apple Earpods or laptop speakers, then it's possible a lot of the heft of TI,OF will be lost. This is music that needs proper speakers or headphones with which to completely envelop the listener. Each pluck of a string, each thick snap of a snare drum, the cymbals washing and cascading about, all of it comes across with the kind of production that serves to bring every last note played to its maximum effect.
The album isn't perfect, of course. Track 5, the appropriately named -, is completely unnecessary. Absolutely, genuinely not needed. It's a little over two minutes of a single ambient sound that goes nowhere. It does provide a bit of air between the end of Brahan and the monstrous opening of I Shall Build Mountains, but ten or fifteen seconds off of - and put on the end of Brahan would have achieved the same goal more effectively. Some might also find the songs somewhat repetitive in their reliance upon titanic riffs with emotive singing that breaks into acoustic passages (but then could that not also be said of others?), and certainly there will be those who want to trim fat away.
More than anything else, music of this ilk needs to connect to its listener, and it's often hard to critique or praise an album if it fails or succeeds to do that. Two people listening to the same album may come away with wildly different interpretations. While one hears a bland, tepid slog of try-hard music done by imitators with no identity of their own, another may hear a goosebump-inducing magnum opus done by a group of musicians who took familiar elements and created a masterpiece that makes your heart swell and your eyes water. If the music fails to connect, any of its strengths feel pointless. If it connects, any of its flaws feel irrelevant.
What this means is if, for whatever reason, Falloch fail to hit those intangibles that grip you as a listener, then all my crowing of all of the album's massive strengths in composition and execution will fall flat. If that's the case, then the best I can do is implore you to listen again. Let go of any biases you might have based on the band's name or their last album. Once This Island, Our Funeral finds purchase, it will take you on an emotional ride the likes of which few albums in the murky realm of "post" and "atmospheric" metal are capable of. It really is that good.
