Agalloch
The Serpent & the Sphere

You've probably already guessed from the rating, so I'll get straight to it: "The Serpent & the Sphere" is not the masterpiece we all hoped to hear. However, (I'll say it right away) it's a great album, and with it, Agalloch confirms themselves as a band aware of their role as a protagonist within today's extreme metal scene.

What else could we expect from the fifth full-length of a band that has managed to rewrite the boundaries of black metal and, with each release (including EPs), has always managed to amaze? With their electrifying debut "Pale Folklore," leveraging the teachings of the enlightened Opeth, Ulver, and Katatonia, the Portland band crafted a very personal formula of black metal, doom, dark-wave, and folk. With the beautiful "The Mantle," they stunned everyone by further expanding their sound, projecting it beyond the horizons of instrumental post-rock and neo-folk. And what about the following stunning "Ashes Against the Grain"?, probably their formal masterpiece, where all the paths attempted until then found a happy synthesis under the aegis of an emotional post-metal now far from any definable label. And if someone winced at the abrupt return to the fiercest black metal shores achieved with "Marrow of the Spirit," how can we deny the vitality of musicians who, once again, managed to surprise their fans and find inspiration and energy for writing "Black Lake Niostang," a suite of over seventeen minutes that probably remains the highest point of their career to date?

"The Serpent & the Sphere," far from causing upheaval in their sound, despite the very high expectations held for them, belongs to the category of "recap albums," representing a phase of reflection and stabilization for the band, physiologically understandable after such illustrious past events. The band finds new inspiration and vitality in their past, and in the face of the vast range of explored sounds (from the dark-folk of "The Mantle" to the black metal resurgence of "Marrow of the Spirit"), opts for a somewhat "middle-of-the-road" approach, choosing the famous middle path that aims not to disappoint anyone, but ultimately spreads disappointment here and there. And it does so by looking mainly at the debut, playing therefore on the fusion of melody and violence of which Agalloch are undisputed masters, without neglecting fragments and ideas developed in other works: it's that "looking back with awareness" that allows the band to come out of the impasse (hopefully temporarily) with great dignity, with lots of skill, and to set up, without fail, an extremely personal product, impeccably detailed, wonderfully balanced in its components, its contrasts, and the succession of fullness and emptiness, with results unimaginable for 90% of bands out there. Where everything, however, is boringly in its place.

If "The Serpent & the Sphere" doesn't offer significant stylistic innovations, it's on the conceptual side that the album acquires its identity: a distinctive feature that nevertheless sets it apart from the rest, given that in Agalloch's discography, each release makes its own history (wrong, very wrong, therefore, to make comparisons). The work places itself from the start on a more abstract level that gives the music it contains a more universal aspect (compared to the intimate and personal dimension and the introspective effort from which past compositions seemed to spring) and, pardon the term, more philosophical, as if intending to proceed by themes rather than images. The album thus takes the shape of a search path, aimed at knowledge and awareness and spiritual growth/elevation, from the slithering crawl (of serpents), we could say, to the vastness of the firmament (the sphere): a journey that engages with the themes of the circularity of time and, although not expressly cited, probably with Nietzsche's eternal return. Hence, the idea of a circular structure (punctuated by instrumental interludes serving as milestones) and of an arrangement of tracks following the concept's expressed dialectics (the same harrowing screams, sobs, and whispers of John Haughm serve as a didactic complement to the observations set to music, even before constituting the expression of feelings). For these reasons, "The Serpent & the Sphere" sounds icy, detached, crystallizing as Agalloch's most rational and thought-out album, a band always conveying an exciting, dare I say incandescent, musical experience.

This coldness is perceived from the very first repeated (tedious) notes of the long suite "Birth and Death of the Pillars of Creation," a true rite of initiation and, despite itself, bearer of that majesty/pomp that is obligatory for opening such an ambitious concept worthily. In its ten minutes, it offers us the most disparate scenarios, but that perfect succession of settings sounds too much like something devised at a table: starting with the impactful doom riffs (reminiscent of the monumentality of the more visionary Tiamat), to the arrival of folk guitars, which, with a stopwatch-like timing, join in, only to be swallowed up again by electricity and the sumptuous movements of a track that, in its epic and simultaneously tragic progress, has a touch of Bathory. Well, my dear folks, all this reeks terribly of calculation. And this will be the core problem of the entire operation: that annoying feeling that comes and goes, and that is nothing more than the suspicion that the band decided in advance what to play and how to play it, without being driven by real inspiration/communicative urgency.

Without a break in continuity, the next track materializes, "(serpent caput)," a dreamy folk interlude where the classical guitar strings, plucked with great skill, outline timeless places, those nocturnal forest landscapes, those landscapes of the soul that cannot be missing in an Agalloch album (what a pity to discover that the track, along with its two twin pieces encountered later, is the work of an external element to the band, someone named N. Larochette).
The three tracks that follow ("The Astral Dialogue," "Dark Matter Gods," and "Celestial Effigy") form the "dynamic" body of the album, a triad of songs that, in relatively contained durations (at least by the band's standards), wonderfully represent the eclecticism, coherence, and compositional maturity of Our Guys: these tracks will surely express Agalloch's more aggressive side without forgoing moving guitar interweavings, suggestions drawn from the darkwave universe, and those authorial sparks that have made Agalloch unique and inimitable.

In this jubilation of notes and tempo changes, on one hand, it's confirmed the total abandonment of the clean voice (used exclusively as second/third-tier accompaniment, in the form of choirs); on the other, the not quite spot-on performance of the otherwise versatile Aesop Dekker: my impression is that the drummer doesn't yet have a clear idea in his head of how an Agalloch song should go, and I don't make it a question of mere technique, but of sensitivity; simply his drumming seems most of the time out of place, either too slow, too fast, too abrupt in tempo changes, or unnecessarily over-the-top with that damned double bass drum launching at the speed of light, thus making one long for both the raw effectiveness of Haughm, who at the start of his career, as an amateur but with a heart as big as the whole world, entertained behind the skins, and the dynamism and fluidity of the excellent Chris Green, who left the group after "Ashes Against the Grain."

The second interlude "Cor Serpentis (the sphere)" is another highly evocative moment serving as a prelude to the final portion of the album, consisting of the dull "Vales Beyond Dimension" (which continues what was stated by the three previously described tracks, but with less conviction and incisiveness) and the splendid twelve minutes of "Plateau of the Ages": in it, we finally find the Agalloch we missed so much, the true Agalloch, those free, airy, "expanded," those of the "infinite post-rock ascension" that made us know and love them. Although not on par with similar episodes traceable in past discography, this long instrumental track perfectly describes that astral experience, beyond time and space, which is the emotional zenith of the work and the most conceptually significant moment. But above all, it has the merit of repositioning the band within the ranks most consonant with them, namely those of exciting music to the core, finally stripping them of that (ostentatious/considered) malice that ended up prevailing, likely to represent the bloody (internal) struggle that the concept put on stage in the first part of the album.

With the outro "(serpens cauda)" the tail of the serpent reconnects with its head, crowned by that magical folk which had already shined in the previous two episodes. The impression that lingers with the echo of the last note is that of having witnessed a grand spectacle: yet another great Agalloch album, a work certainly not free from criticism, but overall bringing with it more virtues than flaws. An album that serves us well enough today, provided the band will return in the future to amaze us with works worthy of its fame.