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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.
Tracklist Lyrics Samples and Videos
01 Limbs (09:51)
The texture of the soul is a liquid
that casts a vermillion flood.
From a wound carved as an oath;
it fills the river bank a sanguine fog.
These arms were meant to be lost!
Hacked, severed and forgotten.
The texture of time is a whisper
that echoes across the flood.
Its hymn resonates from tree to tree,
through every sullen bough it sings.
These boughs were said to be lost!
Torn, unearthed and broken.
Earth to flesh, flesh to wood,
cast these limbs into the water.
Flesh to wood, wood to stone,
cast this stone into the water.
02 Falling Snow (09:38)
The water pours its embracing arms 'round the stone.
Decay drips from the unquiet void.
Where the ice forms. Where life ends.
The stone is by the crimson blood, swallowed.
The red tide beyond the ebon wound, contorted.
My sacrifice bids farewell in this river of memory:
a wave to end all time.
Red birds escape from my wounds,
return as falling snow,
to sweep the landscape a wind haunted.
Wings without bodies.
The snow, the bitter snowfall.
You long to die in her pale arms, crystalline
to become an ode to silence.
In the soul of a mountain of birds, fallen.
The cascading pallor - of ghostless feather.
The snow has fallen
and raised this white mountain
on which you will die
and fade away in silence.
04 Fire Above, Ice Below (10:29)
The woeful silence
and wind's reflection
of your body's pale ode:
an icy fortress
of blood and ages.
Sky fire above, ice below the hearth.
Sky fire above, ice below the hearth.
Fall away from me
to that citadel
at the end of time,
where death sleeps
and dreams of your buried pain.
There has never been a silence like this before.
There will never be an ode like this again.
05 Not Unlike the Waves (09:16)
Aurora swims in the ether,
Emerald fire scars the night sky.
Solstafir!
Amber streams from Sol
Are not unlike the waves
Of the sea, nor the endless horizon of ice.
Solstafir!
Aurora swims in the ether,
Emerald fire paints the twilight.
Heidrun bleeds the golden nectar
For the rising sun and the moon.
The midnight wolves who watch over the dawn,
The golden dawn.
Solstafir!
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