SOUNDTRACK: AGALLOCH-“Into the Painted Grey” (2010).
For this week’s music I ‘m going to look at the Top Ten albums picked by Lars Gotrich (Viking) on NPR’s All Songs Considered. Viking loves black metal and drone music, so most of these albums aren’t on a lot of Top Ten Lists.
Agalloch’s Marrow of the Spirit was his number one album of the year. This is a fascinating song full of ambient guitars and rather beautiful melodies (in the intro). It is a song of longing and distance. The guitars intertwine and are quite nice. Then at almost 2 minutes in (of a 12 minute song), the drums kick in and work as an introduction to the dark metal chords that are forthcoming.
At almost 3 minutes, the vocals come in and this is where they’ll lose most listeners. The vocals are barely audible demon growls. And yet they are low in the mix and don’t overpower the song (I have no idea what he’s singing about).
Indeed, the vocals are almost spoken (sounding not unlike Gollum) setting more of a mood than an actual story. It’s a shame that the vocals are going to turn people off because the rest of the song is rather majestic in scope and tone. Back when black metal first started, vocals like these were matched to equally sludgy music, but when they’re matched to this kind of progressive, epic music, they feel like another instrument, another addition to the melody.
And the rest of the song is so much more than just standard black metal. Especially at the five and a half minute mark when all of the noise pulls back and a beautiful guitar riff comes to the fore. Another great melody break comes again at the 10:30 mark. They really transcend the genre.
I’ve never heard Agalloch before, but their sense of melody and composition is really top-notch, and even with the vocals, this is a pretty stunning piece of music. Not for everyone, obviously, but a good choice for Viking’s song of the year.
[READ: December 29, 2010] “Honor Bound”
This is the first of five one-page anecdotes/stories/histories in this issue of The New Yorker that come under the heading of “Something Borrowed.” I read all five because two of them are by Zadie Smith and Jonathan Franzen. I haven’t read Henry Bromell before, so I don’t know how representative this story is of his other works.
This anecdote concerns Bromell’s time at a boarding school in Wales. The school was an old castle (it sounds awesome). Their library was structured around an honor system; the boys were supposed to write their name down on the list, keep the book for two weeks and then return the book to its place on the shelf. Since his life had very little structure (he was an army brat and didn’t have a “home”), Bromell began keeping the books from the school’s library (carefully hidden on…the shelves in hid bedroom(!)). He even put his name on the title page of some of them.
Of course, he was caught and the justice was swift and brutal. What is funny, as the anecdote comes to a close is that he was not the only one guilty of breaking the honor code.
It’s hard to have much to say about a one-page anecdote, but this was a good one.
I Just Read About That... 
Agalloch: I like it, even if it tries to straddle prog and Black metal, areas nobody should find themselves straddling. The lyrics seem cut from the cloth of the European metal of the 90’s with lots of building canoes and standing on glaciers. Sort of like Nietzsche’s Zarathustra:
“Perched on the cliffside gazing out into the brine
My archaic beard pours downward and joins the feral sea
I am the heritage; the quintessence of myth and legend
The archetype of Pagan might and divinity”.
Dude.
It is an awfully large crevasse to straddle yes.