Agalloch - The Discography

Agalloch are a metal band from Portland, Oregon founded in 1995 by John Haughm. The band combined numerous genres such as post-rock, folk metal, black metal and dark folk into their own unique sound. Over the course of their career they have released 5 albums and numerous EPs the latter mostly featuring material that's more experimental or pure folk music. I discovered them a few years ago, probably in like 2018/2019, through their second record The Mantle and have been an avid fan ever since. In this article I'll be going over all their albums and give my thoughts, feelings and whatever else comes to mind. In the future I might write another article to go over their EPs and demos if I feel like it.

 Pale Folklore

 

Pale Folklore is Agalloch's first full-length release after their two promotional demos in 1997 and 1998. I like to compare this record to Confessions of a Mask by Yukio Mishima, not only because they are both fantastic, but because they both serve as a fantastic entry point into the artist's catalogue presenting you with a lot of their usual themes, and in this case sounds, that will they would continue to explore in later works. This album contains everything you would expect from an Agalloch record, soaring crescendo guitars, nature allegories and mythical stories, melodrama and so on. Thematically, the record follows the myth of Paethon, who tries to drive his father's chariot, he is the son of Helios the sun god, but  being unable to control it he gets struck down by one of Zeus's thunderbolts. He falls down dead into the river Eridanus. 

The first track, or rather three tracks, She Painted Fire Across the Skyline I-III, is one of the most beautiful songs the band has a ever made. They describes Paethon's ride through the sky, where he burns the earth due to his inability to control the chariot, and his grief about the mess he has made. Aside from the song's literal meaning meaning, the combination of ethereal, opera-esque female vocals with subtle guitar and wind samples makes me feel as though I am walking through a forest in a windstorm. Right before I pass out from the cold, I see a clearing with a fireplace and some ghostly women singing this song to me. The Misshapen Steed serves as the transition between She Painted Fire Across the Skyline and the rest of the record, and is a beautiful little instrumental mostly featuring Shane Breyer's keyboard. In the story, it represents the horses from the now-destroyed chariot returning home. The final four songs all feature Agalloch's classic blend of atmospheric black metal with folky influences and some ambient interludes. In Hallways Of Enchanted Ebony Patheon, now dead in the river, is mourned by his sisters, the Heliades, whose tears are transformed into an island. Finally the sisters are transformed into trees to decorate the island. The ending of the song features a terrific section where wind samples blow over the sound of wolves, while a guitar softly plays in the foreground, reminding me somewhat of Die Zeit des Torremondes by Paysage D'Hiver. Dead Winter Days switches perspective to that of the now-dead Patheon, who he calls himself the unmaker, describing the chaos he brought to the earth, a theme continued on As Embers Dress the Sky where mankind is reduced to embers as Pantheon burned the earth. The Melancholy Spirit concludes things with a return to Hallway of Enchanted Ebonys mourning, as Patheon's death is mourned one last time Pantheons, this time by his former lover Cycnus: "One last time i witnessed her / Beauty in the distance, the arms of the trees / Tore at her morbid gown / (...) / Since that day a thousand veil birds have taken flight / And the melancholy rain still pours forever on". 

As I said, Pale Folklore is a record that shines at everything that makes Agalloch great. While it has the unfortunate fate of being overlooked in favour of the records the band went on to make, I still think it's a great entry point to their catalogue and a record worth checking out if you are looking for more Agalloch.

 The Mantle

In my opinion, The Mantle is the complete package - the ultimate Agalloch record. It was the first Agalloch record I head back in I think 2018 or maybe 2017. When I first heard it's second track, In the Shadow Of Our Pale Companion, I was completely mesmerised. A fifteen minute epic composed of  mixture of atmospheric black metal, post rock and folk was something completely new to me at the time. I'm much more familiar with these genres and fusions nowadays, but I still think that this is one of the best songs in the genre. Lyrically, the record mostly deals with more personal themes compared to Pale Folklore, with songs revolving around John Haughm's search for meaning (In the Shadow Of Our Pale Companion), the loss of a companion (You Were but a Ghost in My Arms) and suicidal ideation (A Desolation Song). I Am The Wooden Doors is a more traditional black metal piece about John's desire to  protect his inner world and spirit from what he sees as a broken outer world. Deviating from this is the two piece A Celebration For The Death Of Man... ...And The Great Cold Death Of The Earth, which instead conjure an apocalyptic vision similar to that of the Our Fortress is Burning songs on Ashes Against The Grain. 

Sonically the record feels less dense than Pale Folklore. While Pale Folklore sounds like you are being taken into a dark forest filled with mystical creatures, The Mantle sounds like you're walking through a deep snowy field. It's freezing cold and you're melancholic, but there are also moments of incredible tranquility and beauty when you're gazing upon a landscape devoid of humans and look up at the clear blue sky. 

Diving a bit deeper into the themes of some songs especially In The Shadow Of Our Pale Companion and I Am The Wooden Doors, arguably also The Lodge, you can find references to pantheistic ideas. The band also included the quote "The happiest man is he who learns from nature the lesson of worship" by R.W. Emerson on the CD of this record. On In The Shadow Of Our Pale Companion John seeks for meaning in the world finding it in nature and giving part of himself to it: "Fall, so shall we fall into the nihil? / The nothingness that we feel / In the arms of the pale / In the shadow of the grim / Companion who walks with us / (...) / Here I gaze at a pantheon of oak, a citadel of stone / If this grand panorama before me is what you call God / Then God is not dead / (...) / I walked down to the river / And sat in reflection of what had to be done / An offering of crimson flowed into the water below". ... And The Great Cold Death Of The Earth takes a somewhat environmentalist turn with it's lyrics: "Life is a clay urn on the mantle / And I am shattered on the floor / We are the wounds / And the cold great death of the earth". But the unsung hero of the record is, in my opinion, the closing track A Desolation Song, a five minute neofolk ballad. All metal is stripped away and now you're not walking through the snow anymore instead you're sitting around a campfire with John reminiscing about the melancholy of life. 

Ashes Against The Grain 

Ashes Against The Grain is Agalloch's most straightforward record. Stripping back most of the folk elements of their music, we get a very clean-sounding ,well-structured post metal record that draws huge inspiration from Godspeed You Black Emperor !. Where The Mantle can feel overwhelming and take some time to get into, Ashes Against The Grain opens itself up to the listener much more quickly. While The Mantle does slightly edge this out as my favorite Agalloch record this is certainly their most well-structured record, with zero fat on any of the songs. 

This record tells the story of death: the death of humans, the death of nature around us and perhaps also the death of civilizations. Limbs introduces this theme while sounding almost uplifting with its soaring crescendos while comparing the death of a human to the carving and chopping of a tree: "The texture of the soul is a liquid / That casts a vermilion flood / From a wound carved as an oath / It fills the river bank a sanguine flood / These limbs were meant to be lost / Hacked, severed and forgotten". Falling Snow continues the story as it describes men's return or reabsorption into nature upon death: "Red birds escape from my wounds / Return to as falling snow to sweep the landscape  / A wind, haunted; wings without bodies". The song also features one of my favorite passages in the whole Agalloch catalogue when John Haughm sings: "The snow has fallen, and this white mountain / on which you will die and fade away, in silence", a truly transcendent moment. The Our Fortress is Burning.... trilogy serves as the thematic focal point of the entire album. The first song is a simple melancholic post-rock piece that transitions into II-Bloodbirds, which shares Haughm's view on the failures of mankind as our fortress, civilization or perhaps nature as depicted on the cover of Scars of the Shattered Sky a single that serves as a sort of epilogue to the record, is burning. He says "The god of man is a failure" and while this may refer to organised religion I think it's more likely that he is referring to the values we hold that have let us to the point we are at now. At the end of the song he ditches lyrics completely and screams out in agony. After this, we are left with the III - The Grain, a sombre drone piece as the music quietly flows along we watch our fortress burn to the ground. 

Marrow of the Spirit

After their cleanest and perhaps most accessible record Agalloch went and made their heaviest record to date fully embracing their atmospheric black metal roots. Compared to Ashes Against The Grain, this is a much denser record, filled with a larger variety of sounds than that record's very clean guitar-based sound.  After the intro track, They Escaped the Weight of Darkness, which serves as a mostly ambient mood setter, you are thrown into the first long track of the record, Into the Painted Grey, a full-on atmospheric black metal track complete with tremolo picking. This sound is tastefully combined with Agalloch's more melodic sensibilities. I think that the album cover fits this song and the record perfectly ,but not only because melancholic mood it establishes. The painting has no clear edges, everything seems to sort of blend together. While you are able to make out that there are trees, a river and some snow, the borders between the parts are all somewhat fluid. This is how Into The Painted Grey and the other metal based songs on this record sound. While Ashes Against The Grain was a crystal clear record akin to something Explosions in the Sky might put out, Marrow of the Spirit is a record that utilizes the potential of atmospheric black metal to create a beautifully dense picture out of it's parts. All this culminates in Agalloch's most gritty and "naturalistic" sounding record, and is a triumph for the band in bringing a new sound to the table. In that sense, I feel like this record is closer to The Mantle than to Ashes Against The Grain but while the snow on The Mantle falls slowly around you, on Marrow of the Spirit you are caught in a snowstorm without a map.

 

The Serpent & the Sphere

The last record that the band released before breaking up, and subsequently reuniting for some shows, The Serpent & The Sphere is a record that does not explore much new sonic ground for Agalloch. Instead it uses what they have built, the full on atmospheric black metal songs from Marrow of the Spirit are here, as well as The Mantles dark folk interludes and the soaring crescendos from Ashes Against The Grain. Compared to Marrow of the Spirit, this record takes more time to carefully separate it's different folk and metal elements, offering a less dense sound. Thematically, the record leaves behind the personal and nature themes of their previous few records, taking on more cosmic themes of creation and mythology instead. Birth and Death of the Pillars of Creation is sonically quite reminiscent of Ashes Against the Grain, juxtaposing harsh vocals with clean, folky guitars underneath. Lyrically the song is a reference to the Pillars of Creation, a gas formation in the Eagle Nebula which was photographed by the Hubble Space Telescope back in 1995. A second photo of a what could be a shockwave was taken by the Spitzer Space Telescope, leading to the theory that the Pillars of Creation could have been destroyed about six thousand years ago, a phenomenon that could be witnessed from Earth in about a thousand years: "By way of light across a vast millennia / I can behold this grandeur at its infancy / Though I know it has already a way a millennia before".  Agalloch also seemingly put some esoteric twist on this phenomenon with the opening lines: "Towers... / Deity forged architecture / Swirling in and out of form / (...) / My work is done / Pillars ...". Another notable song on the record, at least for me, is Plateau of the Ages a slow-burning post-metal piece that unfolds its beauty over twelve minutes.

While The Serpent & The Sphere is certainly not a record that goes out of its way to innovate much on Agalloch's existing sound, a fact which it has been criticised for a lot over the last ten years, I think it brings together quite beautifully what has made Agalloch so great up until this point.

𝑺𝑬𝑬 𝒀𝑶𝑼 𝑺𝑷𝑨𝑪𝑬 𝑪𝑶𝑾𝑩𝑶𝒀...