Agalloch - 12 CD Collection 1999-2012

×

Agalloch - 12 CD Collection 1999-2012

Close

Collection includes 4 studio albums, 4 EP and 3 compilations by American dark folk metal band Agalloch.

×

Agalloch - 12 CD Collection 1999-2012

Close

The origins of Agalloch date back to 1995 and the disintegration of the band Aeolachrymae. As that group died, three phoenixes emerged from the ashes, Sussurrus Inanis, Nothing, and Agalloch. Mixing black metal with atmospheric textures, gothic doom, and neo-folk and post-rock touches, the Portland, OR-based group quickly developed a rabid cult following. Their first demo, From Which of This Oak, was recorded in 1996; in 1998, they recorded another demo and shopped it around to labels. Their efforts paid off as the group landed a deal with The End Records. The following year the guys – vocalist/guitarist John Haughm, bassist Jason William Walton, guitarist John Anderson, and keyboardist Shane Breyer – released their experimental and brooding debut, Pale Folklore. The EP Of Stone, Wind and Pillor appeared in 2001 before Agalloch's critically acclaimed sophomore effort, The Mantle, hit stores in 2002. Four years passed before the band released their next full-length, Ashes Against the Grain, again to high critical and fan praise.

Biography by Gary Hill, Allmusic.com

×

Agalloch - 12 CD Collection 1999-2012

Close

Not only was Agalloch's Pale Folklore an astoundingly ambitious and accomplished debut, it made for a stark geographical anomaly, since its eclectic, avant-garde folk-metal was the sort of thing one would expect to emerge from Scandinavia – not Portland, OR. Epic, atmospheric, deeply melancholy, yet extremely heavy, its songs showed the same level of daring cross-pollination as those of Norway's Ulver or Sweden's Opeth, as well as off-the-beaten-path experiments with folk music forms pioneered by Finland's Amorphis, among others – yet unquestionably treaded its own, unique path. The album's fascinating journey begins with the three-song suite titled "The Painted Fire Across the Skyline," featuring forceful, driving power chords, elegiac melodies on acoustic guitar and piano, and half-whispered, half-screamed vocals backed by mood-enhancing icy winds. Next (and get a load of these titles!) comes the astonishingly beautiful "The Misshapen Steed," alternating painfully sparse keyboard tinkling with lush mock-string orchestrations; followed by a return to more energetic dark metal intercut with melancholy quiet passages on stunning achievements like "Hallways of Enchanted Ebony," "Dead Winter Days," and "The Embers Dress the Sky." Finally, colossal closer "The Melancholy Spirit" brings all of these elements around for one final, inventively varied go-round, while also introducing an odd, choppy guitar figure reminiscent of the Police! All in all, and with or without its folk subgenre connotations, Pale Folklore was as important a black metal album as any American band ever produced; and arguably one of a handful that helped launch the country to worldwide respect in this arena for the new millennium, whereas before Agalloch, most bands had been mere apprentices to the Scandinavian masters.

Review by Eduardo Rivadavia, Allmusic.com

×

Agalloch - 12 CD Collection 1999-2012

Close

Of Stone, Wind and Pillor collects material left off Agalloch's first album, 1999's very impressive Pale Folklore. Its first three songs were previously released in a now hard-to-find 7", and sound quite similar to the depressive ambient folk-metal heard on the band's debut. The remaining two cuts offer more of a departure, and include an awkward-sounding cover of Sol Invictus' "Kneel to the Cross" and a low-key ambient instrumental named "A Poem by Yeats." In some respects, this release might have served as a good introduction, even if in reverse chronological order, to Agalloch's challenging sound, but when heard outside a full album context, these brief snapshots come across as simply too scattered and unfocused.

Review by Eduardo Rivadavia, Allmusic.com

×

Agalloch - 12 CD Collection 1999-2012

Close

Agalloch's second album, The Mantle, is a leaps-and-bounds improvement over their first full-length, 1999's Pale Folklore. That wasn't a bad album, but it was hampered by a low-budget production job that didn't suit the sophisticated tone of the music. The improved production is the first thing that stands out here, evident in the more detailed arrangements, the classier guitar tones, and the fuller overall sound. That said, the music itself has also evolved and matured. Along with the Katatonia-inspired guitar work and grim, scratchy black metal vocals also present on Pale Folklore, a number of other sounds work their way into The Mantle, among them prominent acoustic guitar-strumming and cleanly sung vocals, Scandinavian-tinged folk guitar-picking (the middle breakdown during "I Am the Wooden Doors" is straight out of Ulver's bag), timpani percussion, and a few subtle electronic interludes. It is not just the range of sounds that's impressive, though, but rather how smoothly they are woven together, creating an album that flows from beginning to end, using its entire 68-minute running time to make its point without wearing out its welcome. Agalloch's biggest strength, much like the early work of Ulver and Katatonia, is their ability to create an epic type of listening experience without resorting to bombast or heavy-handedness, and that quality is plainly evident here. Factor in the excellent artwork and packaging (which features photos of the bandmembers looking very poised and European), and you have one of 2002's most accomplished and surprising metal-related albums.

Review by William York, Allmusic.com

×

Agalloch - 12 CD Collection 1999-2012

Close

The Grey is the third EP by the American metal band Agalloch. It was released through Vendlus Records on February 29, 2004, in a limited run of 1,000 copies. The two songs on The Grey are reinterpretations of two tracks on The Mantle. This EP is part of a duology, alongside The White.

Wiki

×

Agalloch - 12 CD Collection 1999-2012

Close

Thanks to a pair of brilliantly executed albums in 1999's Pale Folklore and 2002's The Mantle (plus 2001's none too shabby Of Stone, Wind and Pillor EP), Portland, Oregon's Agalloch became, quite possibly, the greatest American black metal band ever, or at the very least, the first American black metal band that really mattered! Such claims should not to be thrown about lightly, its true; but why measure words when faced with the worshipful fervor with which extreme metal fans embraced the enigmatic quartet's inspired creations, featuring corrosive black metal spliced with delicate folk music into arrangements improbably fluid, majestic, and avant-garde? Oh, and the torturously long waits in between their releases didn't hurt matters either, only fueling the notoriously withdrawn band's budding cult legend, while their supporters dug in their heels for what wound up becoming an anxious, four-year vigil leading up to the arrival of Agalloch's third magnum opus, 2006's Ashes Against the Grain. Interestingly, as was the case with each previous effort, this offering displays marked evolution beyond its direct predecessor, so that, where The Mantle had incorporated ever-increasing doses of gothic and doom metal into Pale Folklore's original black metal-folk template, Ashes Against the Grain contains even fewer lingering vestiges (no more female vocals, for instance) of those acoustic guitar-dominated, Scandinavian backwoods elements. Rather, ever-shifting yet still cohesive ten-minute monoliths like "Limbs," "Fire Above, Ice Below," and "Not Unlike the Waves," generally make mere interludes out of their stark, echoing acoustic piano and guitar passages (though strikingly imaginative ones, at that); while vocalist John Haughm makes almost as frequent use of mellow, melodious tones as he does his signature black metal-style rasp. Actually, the latter vocal attack's continued prominence is especially pertinent in the event that a song like "Falling Snow" – almost entirely definable as driving, gothic death metal – should provoke any pointless semantic discussions regarding Agalloch's ultimate allegiance to black or death metal – those often bickering, but inextricably cross-pollinating pillars of musical extremity. Not only for the obviously unnecessary nature of such Byzantine nitpicking, but because Agalloch's unique talents for evoking a constant sense of mysterious, atmospheric, ambiance supersedes most simplistic musical pigeonholing as black, death, or any kind of metal. A visible thread linking their entire body of work so far, this sense of mystery is epitomized by Ashes Against the Grain's three-part closing suite, which culminates in the cathartic climax of "Bloodbirds," and sets the stage for yet another stretch of painful expectation for that next, as yet unwritten chapter in their fascinating evolution.

Review by Eduardo Rivadavia, Allmusic.com

×

Agalloch - 12 CD Collection 1999-2012

Close

The Demonstration Archive is a compilation album with music from the band Agalloch's unsigned years, which date from 1996 to 1998. Tracks 1 through 3 come from Agalloch's first demo from 1997, From Which of This Oak; tracks 4 through 6 come from an unreleased 7" vinyl EP recorded in Autumn 1998 called Of Stone, Wind and Pillor (which would later be released as a limited edition MCD with bonus tracks through The End Records); and tracks 7 and 8 come from Agalloch's 1998 promo release.

All the material was taken from the original DAT tapes and analog reels. Aside from some slight mastering to keep the songs at an even volume, nothing was edited or polished. This collection includes a 12-page booklet with notes, era-related artwork, and never-before seen photos from a January 1998 session.

The recordings for "Hallways of Enchanted Ebony" and "The Melancholy Spirit" are not the same recordings from the album Pale Folklore.

Wiki

×

Agalloch - 12 CD Collection 1999-2012

Close

Even though Agalloch's career was essentially founded upon a fresh-sounding platform of black metal infused with folk music (their debut album was named Pale Folklore, for Christ's sake!), the Oregonians proceeded to shift aesthetic gears over the years by following their black-folk-pagan sophomore masterpiece, The Mantle, with a third long-player, Ashes Against the Grain, that featured a no less inspired blend of gothic doom, death, and black metal, instead. 2008's The White EP, then, appears to have been fashioned specifically to redress this progression, by jettisoning most every sign of heavy metal – black, death, or otherwise – so that the band could revisit (and expand) the haunting acoustic guitar frameworks and atmospheric backdrops that made them so unique to begin with. Sure enough, electric guitars are used very sparingly throughout, as mere accents and shimmering backdrops to the primary, acoustic guitar pluckings that dominate sublime creations like "The Isle of Summer" and "Birch Black" (both reminiscent of Pale Folklore), and "Pantheist" (this one redolent of The Mantle, in all its gothic folk glory). Vocals, too, are treated like some kind of unnecessary luxury here: figuring only as chorused "aahhhs'" in the last-mentioned track; as intimate whispers on the uncommonly lush "Sowilo Rune" (arguably the EP's most drop-dead gorgeous offering); and finally, crooning lyrics in the traditional sense for the straight-folk low point of "Birch White." The remaining two cuts consist of a synthesizer-woven beehive of sound named "Hollow Stone" and a stark, piano-led coda named "Summerisle Reprise," which along with "The Isle of Summer" and "Sowilo Rune," contains dialog sound bytes from the 1973 cult horror film, The Wicker Man (for those who hadn't yet grasped the connection between both works). And not coincidentally, like that movie's evocatively creepy soundtrack, The White EP also plays like a half-hour cinematic score all its own – which is surely as it was intended. As a result of all of these superlatives, The White EP earns a special place within Agalloch's formidable discography, virtually as essential as the group's stellar full-length albums.

Review by Eduardo Rivadavia, Allmusic.com

×

Agalloch - 12 CD Collection 1999-2012

Close

Oregonian heavy metal iconoclasts Agalloch have rarely sat still, creatively speaking, over the course of their celebrated career, and yet there's a distinct back-to-basics feel about the group's oftentimes familiar-sounding fourth full-length opus, 2010's Marrow of the Spirit. Mind you, this doesn't result from the album having been been recorded and mixed strictly on analog equipment (making it somewhat less than pristine, yet intentionally so, in the production department), but rather because the music heard on Marrow of the Spirit feels like something of a stylistic omnibus, covering many of the radically different chapters visited individually by the band's prior discography. Surely almost no one expected Agalloch to dive into the black metal abyss ever again, never mind as lustily as they do on "Into the Painted Grey," which may actually be the group's most vicious composition ever. But far from settling for uniformity, this 12-minute epic (preceded by a solo cello piece performed by Garyceon's Jackie Perez Gratz) still makes room for sublime melodies and calmer moods amid its coarse riffs and scything blastbeats, and is then followed by a more restrained and eerie folk-metal journey called "The Watcher's Monolith," which is actually quite reminiscent of Agalloch's 2002 landmark The Mantle. Not that fans will mind that one bit – certainly not once the momentous, truly groundbreaking "Black Lake Niðstång" begins to unfold, covering 17 minutes' worth of distinct but interlocking sonic vistas of breathtaking imagination, from its dreamy atmospherics through its doom-like drones to its cathartic metallic finale. As things turn out, this artistic high point is also impossible to top, even though Agalloch deliver a pair of additional stunners in "Ghosts of the Midwinter Fires" (an insistently paced gothic rocker built on Echoplexing plucked guitar lines) and "To Drown" (characterized by a somber minimalism and melancholy chorused guitars snaking around yet another evocative cello performance). Rounding out this album's aforementioned anthologizing character, these last two movements occasionally draw parallels with 2006's darkwave-infused Ashes Against the Grain and even 2008's magnificent Wickerman folk homage, The White EP, but to call it repetition would not do them justice. Instead, Marrow of the Spirit merely reflects a mature Agalloch, taking stock of a decade's worth of peerlessly pioneering extreme metal, before forging ahead into further worlds unknown.

Review by Eduardo Rivadavia, Allmusic.com

×

Agalloch - 12 CD Collection 1999-2012

Close

The Compendium Archive is a compilation album by the American metal band Agalloch. It was released through Licht Von Dämmerung on March 20, 2010. The album was limited to 250 hand-numbered copies, and was sold exclusively at the band's two Romanian gigs in March 2010.

Wiki

×

Agalloch - 12 CD Collection 1999-2012

Close

×

Agalloch - 12 CD Collection 1999-2012

Close

For most bands, writing and recording a 21-minute track that constitutes an entire EP would mean exploring and fostering new elements of their sound. From transitions and dynamics to concepts and stamina, such a long expanse makes different demands than several three- or four-minute songs, even if they're strung together into a much longer record. A tune that becomes a trek must be cohesive but not complacent, or built on a small set of ideas that can stay compelling without petrifying into boredom. But Portland's Agalloch aren't strangers to the epic or ambitious. For the last decade, they've crafted album after album of seamless grandiosity, surrounding hard-edged black-metal bursts with meditative rests and triumphant rises. Though its 65 minutes came split across six tracks, the band's last release, 2010's glorious Marrow of the Spirit, was an album in the most unified sense, where each track seemed to bleed into the next and in which repeated sounds and thoughts blotted the entire experience.

While "Faustian Echoes", the lone monstrosity on the new EP of the same name, is in fact the longest song Agalloch have ever released, neither its flow nor its shape are foreign to the band's longtime listeners. Based upon Goethe's tale of the mythical scholar who trades his religious servitude for the possibility of transcendence and impossible knowledge, Faustian Echoes keys upon a series of dramatic readings from the text and excerpts occasionally howled by frontman John Haughm. The band lurches in and swells slowly, a theatric exchange between Faust and his literary tempter, Mephistopheles, cutting over a din of electronics and electric guitar. Within the first eight minutes, there is, in sequence, a systems-go blitz, a down-tempo shift, a forlorn drift, a determined build, and a horns-up solo that goads Agalloch back into another blackened onslaught. That's the gist of Faustian Echoes, which ebbs and cascades in prototypical Agalloch fashion; indeed, aside from the lack of track breaks and the addition of tawdry readings, this EP feels only like an addition to the band's catalog, not at all an extension of it.

But Faustian Echoes isn't disappointing because it sounds like Agalloch, even if this does seem like something of a lost opportunity for the band to stretch bounds beyond relative track lengths. Instead, it's a letdown because the fastidiousness that's historically gone into Agalloch albums– where each layer has its own space, and each musical moment or phrase seems completely developed and considered as part of a comprehensive whole– is strangely absent. Sure, the heaviest, fastest moments are still compelling, as this remains an unfailingly good quartet captured by ace producer Billy Anderson. But it's hard not to get lost within the instrumental spans or, worse yet, simply to give up on them. The doomy, down-tempo portion that separates the track's first part from its second is laughably rote, with the guitars grinding over cavernous thuds panned across the channels; it's understandable to expect something more interesting from a band with such a pedigree of intricacy. The same goes for the track's more tranquil impasses, which seem like slapdash ellipses that serve only to hinder Agalloch's momentum.

If, as a few others have posited, Faustian Echoes is a push back toward black metal for Agalloch after Marrow of the Spirit's well-considered grace, it seems to me less like a conscious move and more like the symptom of a few flawed parts. After all, writing your longest piece to date in an attempt to return to your basics seems like a wrongheaded plan. No, the stumbling block doesn't seem to be the length or nostalgia for the rudiments; Agalloch have mastered more impressive tracts. It's just that the pieces that should link the length together don't.

Review by Grayson Currin, Pitchfork.com