Agalloch
Ashes Against The Grain

THE REVIEW

I had just finished reading “The Dharma Bums” by Jack Kerouac, and by now I could consider myself a fan of one of the greatest fathers of the American beat generation. I felt a sense of gentleness infusing my soul, a clear existential contemplation on which to lay my worries, my paranoias. Then, during those days, I read an interview with Agalloch, knowing their new album had been released, and I was curious to see what they had created after 4 years of silence since “The Mantle.”

It so happened that the Portland quartet was condemning Bush's politics and in describing “the glories of America,” they mentioned Mark Twain and my beloved Kerouac. Right. Crossing the Arizona desert listening to Tom Waits, climbing the forgotten Californian mountains with raisins and peanuts in your pocket; and then venturing into the forests of the North Pacific to meditate and leave everything behind in the flow of a life that does not know how to listen to the prayers of our tormented soul; and listening to the sound of the deer like the one that stands out on the cover of “The Mantle,” and watching the horizon and the sun dissolve in the red of the twilight, smoking a cigarette in the middle of nowhere, getting lost in silence, in the contemplation of the slow-falling rain, and feeling alone and forgotten by God on those damned snowy mountains. Yes, these are things you can only do in America.

This was the state of mind I was in when I pressed the play button with “Ashes Against The Grain” inside, and when the distortions of “Limbs” arrived, the effect was disarming. Agalloch have changed. This isn't gothic-folk metal with black accents like in “Pale Folklore,” there's no intimacy and calm delicacy of “The Mantle,” and those soft and reassuring atmospheres. “Ashes Against The Grain” is NOT reassuring. The distortions here suffocate, intoxicate the air as in “Limbs,” when an arpeggio breaks the rust in the sky, and then the atmosphere becomes subdued until a sudden drumbeat: and then the distorted guitars take the lead. Melody that envelops, melody that detaches us from the world, this is the music we love, damn it. I came to think that this was the gothic metal album I had been waiting for my whole life. But this is NOT gothic metal.

Here they play with the soft black sounds of Ulver, and then with that feeling that only the early Katatonia were capable of creating, forming a balance between the ambient dark metal that only they manage to handle. In such a vast ocean, only the melody rules, here there is no concern about hiding (or showing) one’s influences. Here they just play. Here is where emotion resides. Here are the Pink Floyd that emerge, and at times even Isis, in that delicate soundscape that makes us shiver on the couch with headphones in our ears. Then it touches funeral, it plucks the secret strings of the soul, and a mournful doom unfolds on the horizon, but what matters is the airy openness, the melody that prevents us from despairing in the face of life's ultimate meaning, but moves us to tears. We are just grains of sand in an infinite sea, Agalloch say... Words that can disturb and upset us; but this is poetry, and one cannot remain indifferent. Then Hughm's voice rises from the whisper, becomes whispered screaming, a nocturnal and damned storyteller in the forest of life.

I can only invite you to follow him, even if it scares you, so anguished, so restless, so dark. Because pain makes us suffer, we struggle to find a meaning in it, but pain is also poetry, and as such, it knows how to warm our soul, heart, and life.