Two weeks ago the most important band of the last decade of my life came to an end. I connected with the music of Agalloch in a deep, spiritual way that has rarely happened with other music—and if you know me, you know how deeply I love music. It is not a statement I make casually. I am fortunate to call a couple of the band members friends, and those connections will not change, but I am profoundly sad at the loss of the band as a whole and whatever future creative works might have emerged. I am still processing it, and I will be for a while. This post is part of the processing.
I don’t consider other writers and literature as a whole
to influence the writing I do, beyond the formative influences that are part of
my DNA at this point. I read a great deal, and I love little more than cracking
open a new story and experiencing the worlds the author has created. But I
almost never think of stories when I sit down to create my own. I never finish reading
a story and say, “I am inspired and want to go write now!” Music, on the other
hand, deeply influences and inspires me. When I sit down to write, I am as
often as not trying to capture in words a mood or emotion that a song has
inspired in me. (A futile task, but art is about the impossible.) Music is
almost always playing while I’m writing. Music makes me excited, alive, joyous,
crazy, reflective, sorrowful--creative. Creativity is a spiritual act for me,
and the cathedral of sound is the house I worship in.
I’ve listened to Agalloch more than any other band these
past ten years. For perspective, iTunes informs me I currently have 30,732
songs over 2,248 albums—enough music to play for 100 days without repeating a
song. And I don’t think I even have all my CDs loaded into iTunes and I
certainly don’t have all of my cassettes and vinyl. I listen to a lot of music
and I’m always discovering new music. Yet even with all of this I repeatedly
come back to a handful of key bands that, essentially, mean the world to me.
Agalloch is the only one of these bands that I’ve discovered in the 00s; most
of them date to my teenage years or very early adulthood. Agalloch is an
outlier among outliers. Every time I listen to them, I want to create a piece
of art that makes someone else feel like their music makes me feel.
I have selected below seven songs/memories that represent
everything that was great—and will remain great—about their work and my journey
with it.
1. Odal
I could never pick a favorite Agalloch song, but if
forced to, this one would be in the running. What made Agalloch special was
their ability to capture the landscape of the Pacific Northwest (or Cascadia,
if you prefer, but that is a loaded term in the metal underground) in sound.
When I hear this song I see trees poking through the fog on the Pacific coast,
a light rain falling (perhaps a sliver of sun breaking through grey clouds) and
the oceanside at the end of the world (Moclips/Ocean Shores.) I have a physical
reaction to this piece of music, a feeling of leaving my body behind and
becoming part of that landscape, part of something larger and beyond my
understanding. Everything in the physical world around me stops. This is what
great art can do.
2. Portland to
Seattle Back-to-Back Shows
In October of 2011 I drove down by to Portland by myself
(usually the family goes), stayed with my best friend and his wonderful family,
went out with said friend and watched Agalloch at Branx as part of the Fall
Into Darkness fest, caught some shuteye, drove back to Seattle the next day,
met up with all of my Metal Kommand friends and watched Agalloch at El Corazon.
It’s the kind of thing you don’t bat an eye at doing when you are 20 and single
but is more unusual when you are 37 with a wife and kids. It was a glorious
weekend and just what my life needed at the time. Agalloch had really come into
their own as a live band by then (they started out as a studio-only project)
and both shows were great. The Portland show was the first time I ever
witnessed a mosh pit at one of their shows, and that was strange. It was a sign
that they were no longer just drawing a little kvlt crowd but were picking up
mainstream awareness (I think the NPR review of Marrow of the Spirit happened around then.) Into the Painted Grey, which
they opened with IIRC, captures that weekend well. Here’s professionally shot
footage of the song from around the same time period. It is a force of nature. “How
long shall I suffer here?”
This will be the first year in the last—six? seven?—I won’t
have attended an Agalloch show. It feels strange to type that.
3. Not Unlike the
Waves
Ashes Against the
Grain was the album I discovered Agalloch with, having been vaguely aware
of the prior two but not having heard them at that time. This discovery
coincided with a period where my writing stepped up a level; after having
drafted a couple of novels and realizing that I simply didn’t have time
available in my life to bring them to an acceptable level, I embraced the short
story format fully and concentrated all my creative energy there. I wrote several
stories listening to Ashes during
this period (one, “Limbs,” took its title from the first track) and almost
inevitably I would have to pause for the first two minutes of Not Unlike the
Waves, raise my hands slowly with the buildup, pound on the desk as the drums
explode and the guitars wash in at one minuet, and sing as the song rises up
again from its gorgeous acoustic interlude like a prayer and the clean vocals
come in at 2:45.
This song is very much like the waves: it rises, falls,
rises again, falls again but never loses its power. It’s arguably the most “catchy”
and “accessible” song they ever recorded, those these terms don’t apply to a
band like Agalloch anyway. Once again I’m at the ocean, at the edge of the world,
witnessing the elemental force and beauty of nature at her most raw. “Solstafir!”
The band filmed a video for this, the only non-concert
video they ever did, and they didn’t care for it a whole lot, plus some of the
song gets cut out, so I never link to that version. Here’s the song in full:
4. Faustian
Spirits: Touring the Tour Bus
July of 2012 saw Agalloch undertaking their longest U.S.
tour. The second date of the tour was at the Crocodile Café in Seattle. It was
a hot night, and rather than socialize in the noisy, sweltering atmosphere of
the club we chose to socialize outside on the street corner in front of the
club. The conversation was great, the mood was celebratory, and I could have
stayed out there all night—but of course the band had a show to play. Before
they did, however, they gave us a brief tour of the tour bus. I’ve been around
music all my life, but I’d never honestly set foot on a tour bus before, so it
was a pretty awesome experience…and I was also glad I would not have to spend
the next month living in those cramped quarters as they did. We then went into
the Crocodile where they laid waste to the place, playing probably the best
show I ever saw them do. I think I lost ten pounds in sweat alone.
The tour was in support of Faustian Echoes, their recently released EP. After the critical and
commercial breakthrough of Marrow of the
Spirit, an EP release consisting of one dense, labyrinth 22-minute song
probably confused a lot of people. But I saw it as a brave, principled work
that demonstrated this band would always follow their creative interests, regardless
of outside perception. I was suitably impressed when they played the entire
piece live—and played it damn well. While I had liked the piece prior, seeing
it live opened the door for me, and I spent the next several months playing it
daily, giving myself over to its strange mood. It’s not a good entry point for
someone unfamiliar with the band, but if the aesthetic appeals to you and you
are invigorated by challenging, fascinating music you’ll find a lot to love. I
did…
5. Dark Matter
Gods
In 2014 Agalloch released what would ultimately be their
final album, The Serpent and the Sphere.
As strong as any of their work, I played this album nearly every day for a
year. There’s not a less than great song to be found, but something about Dark
Matter Gods sank particularly deep into me. The song made me feel emotions that
I find impossible to put into words. It spoke to the vastness of the universe,
and listening to it I felt as though I were alone observing the sky, far away
from humanity and its concerns. Silently bearing witness. Listening to this
song remains a spiritual experience for me.
One afternoon the song finished just as I pulled into the
parking lot at the YMCA. I was taking my daughter to swim practice. Normally,
if I’m not working out during her practice, I sit and read at the edge of the
pool. On this day, though, the song was echoing in my head, pushing a desire to
create that I could not stifle. So I pulled out my phone and began writing a
story in an email that I later sent to myself. The story is named after this
song and I can honestly say I’ve worked harder on it than any story I’ve
written and as such, when I decided to start submitting some of my work this
past year, it became the first one I sent out. It may never get published, but
it is an important story for me and one I am proud of. It has nothing do with
the song lyrically, I simply wanted to create something that captured the mood
and emotion the song raises in me. Whether or not I succeeded is debatable, but
the story would never have existed without the song.
6. The White
Neofolk
was an important influence on Agalloch and one of the key shadings of their
sound. The White EP, however, is like
nothing else in their canon. Primarily acoustic and laden with samples from the
classic 1973 pagan horror film The Wicker
Man, the reflective and at times almost gentle album is a gorgeous work of
art. Unlike other Agalloch records, I don’t often listen to this one while I
write. But I do listen to it often and in particular I enjoy pulling out the
vinyl and playing it as the late afternoon sun streams through my downstairs windows.
Most of Agalloch’s work captures the rainy grey Pacific Northwest; The White captures the rarer and
much-loved warm summer afternoons.
While I jokingly say this is the one Agalloch album I can
play around my wife, the largely vocal-less album (Birch White the exception)
is more approachable for those who don’t normally care for metal or the
whispers and growls of many other Agalloch songs. It’s hard to pick just one
track to highlight as the album flows together perfectly as a piece. Below is
the opening cut, The Isle of Summer, which establishes the theme and mood of the
record.
7. Hallways of
Enchanted Ebony
In 2010 I received a bonus after my annual review at work
and as such was able to purchase a gift for myself: a very
limited edition wooden box set of the first three Agalloch records, plus the
compilation Of Stone, Wind and Pillor. This hand-numbered set, with the
Agalloch logo burned into the box lid, was limited to 500 copies and is one of
my cherished possessions. At the time, it was impossible to get those first
three records on vinyl without paying crazy prices (they’ve since been
re-released.) I had to drive to the post office on a rainy late afternoon to
pick it up. I got home, and immediately laid all four records out on the floor—the
artwork forms a larger picture, as well as standing on its own. Despite my deep
love of music, I don’t often geek out over packaging, but this was an
exception.
I particularly enjoyed playing the first Agalloch record,
Pale Folklore. The only release I haven’t touched upon in this post, it is very
much a debut record. Some of the artistic choices are very much of its era, but
that said, the sound as a whole is a unique blend that gave them their own
identity from the get-go. I love this record, even its occasional awkwardness,
because it is really reaching for something beyond slapping some songs together
and calling it an album. Probably the greatest track on the album, and one of
the few from they would play live with regularity throughout their career, is Hallways
of Enchanted Ebony. There’s a good argument to be made for Dead Winter Days as
well, and the two songs always flowed well together (they are paired together
on the record.) But I give the nod to Hallways because I never tire of the
opening, the mix of clean and dirty guitars a perfect maelstrom of sound, like
stormy winter day (or perhaps a dead winter day…heh.) They would use this
template often in their career but they clearly had it nailed from the
beginning. Note: the last two minutes of this track is really more of a
separate piece, a lone guitar line and some lonely winter sound effects. It
makes sense in the context of the album but may not as much listening to the
song on its own.
There is so much I didn’t touch on in this post…the beauty
of the first half of the Hawthorne Passage…The
Mantle soundtracking drives up and down the I5 corridor…the transcendent
beauty of Bloodbirds (which I did talk about in the first
seven things post)…the magic of numbers such as Falling Snow, Black Lake
Nidstang, Tomorrow Never Comes, The Wilderness, Vales Beyond Dimension, Birth
and Death of the Pillars of Creation…but at some point you have to stop writing
and just listen to the songs. I will miss this band terribly, but I am grateful
for the music they created.
The
god of man is a failure
Our
fortress is burning against the grain of the shattered sky
Charred
birds escape from the ruins and return as cascading blood
Dying
bloodbirds pooling, feeding the flood
The
god of man is a failure
And
all of our shadows are ashes against the grain
