Ten Years #46: Agalloch

Posted on May 31, 2013 by necromoonyeti

Decade of last.fm scrobbling countdown:
46. Agalloch (653 plays)
Top track (147 plays): Odal (Demo), from The End Records Sampler: At the End of Infinity [Echoes & Thoughts of Wonder] (2002)
Featured track: Limbs, from Ashes Against the Grain (2006)

Throughout the first decade of this century, Agalloch stood at the forefront of some of the most progressive movements in metal. They were the product of a new generation of musicians exceptionally well informed on musical trends happening outside of their own genre. Citing such diverse influences as Katatonia, Ulver, and Godspeed You! Black Emperor, they endowed their first major release, Pale Folklore in 1999, with an entirely unique sound. Bleak neofolk guitar and piano merged with black metal as the two most dominant styles to paint a beautiful and desolate snowy landscape that demands the listener’s full attention from start to finish. The folk felt, to me at least, just as influenced by neofolk artists far beyond the metal spectrum like Current 93 and Death in June as by Ulver’s Kveldssanger.

The Mantle in 2002 took this diversity a step further, incorporating post-rock proper as a central structural theme for most of the album. But it was Ashes Against the Grain, in 2006, that really solidified their place as one of the most significant metal bands of the era. It got back to the heavier influences that The Mantle had left behind, offering a seamless fusion of folk, post-rock, and metal that would inspire dozens of bands in the years to follow. As a band first born of black metal, their developed sound helped pave the way for a new era in experimental bm that broke the restraints of the 1990s. These restraints, of course, had long been shattered by Ulver, with Enslaved and ex-Emperor frontman Ihsahn following close behind, but these artists’ credentials as legendary musicians were well established while formulaic black metal was still the norm. Agalloch, alongside Alcest, appeared to me as the next generation, born into a much broader gene pool of music and taking full advantage of their situations. As the seven years since Ashes Against the Grain have shown, progressive and post-black metal was the new wave–and perhaps one of the most outstanding waves in the history of metal in general. I can’t tell you whether Agalloch directly influenced the bands that followed them or not, but their open-minded ability to appreciate black metal for its unique sensory qualities without giving in to the corpse-paint drenched exclusiveness of its accompanying culture drastically expanded the genre’s exposure.

I would say today that Pale Folklore is my favorite Agalloch album, though Ashes struck me the most when I first heard it. The version of the song I’ve played the most in Agalloch’s library though does not appear on any of their albums. It was the first track I ever heard by the band–an edited pre-release version of Odal from The Mantle that The End Records had featured on a free sampler cd. The song is not appreciably different from its studio album variant, but it cuts out sizable chunks of the intro and outro to create a much more repeatable track. Odal immediately struck me as deliciously similar in atmosphere to Matt Uelmen’s Tristram from the Diablo series, and I am often inclined to put the two on repeat together. I’ll leave you with a video of the finalized cd version of the song:

Ten Years #47: Explosions in the Sky

Posted on May 22, 2013 by necromoonyeti

Decade of last.fm scrobbling countdown:
47. Explosions in the Sky (647 plays)
Top track (93 plays): Memorial, from The Earth is Not a Cold Dead Place (2003)
Featured track: Your Hand in Mine, from The Earth is Not a Cold Dead Place (2003)

f#a#oo and Ágætis Byrjun might constitute my first introductions into the diverse world of sound we generalize as post-rock, but Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Sigur Rós both forged unique paths that few if any bands have successfully replicated. When I think of the quintessential sound I associate with the genre, it’s Explosions in the Sky and Mono that first come to mind. (And Isis, for the genre’s metal variant.) I don’t know that any band has so successfully perfected the build-up to explosion formula without ever delving into metal as these guys. (The featured track here accomplishes this in a particularly subtle manner.)

While Memorial is my most played track, I don’t consider it my favorite. That title more rightly belongs to Your Hand in Mine. Their level of quality is so consistent though that nearly any track could have incidentally topped my play chart. Another thing I’ve always found so compelling about these guys is their knack for appropriate titles. This extends beyond a band name that perfectly captures their sound and the most pleasantly optimistic album title I have ever encountered. (The Earth is Not a Cold Dead Place) Their track titles casually reach for the stars, predicting an overload of emotion and imagery that the songs themselves never fail to deliver. It’s amazing how much “A Poor Man’s Memory” and “First Breath After Coma” are enhanced by four simple words. “The Birth and Death of Day” practically names itself. More than any band I have encountered save perhaps Krallice, Explosions in the Sky have mastered the art of employing language as a descriptive subtitle to the thoughts and experiences they directly express through sound. The absurdity of this for Explosions is that they achieve it while remaining an exclusively instrumental band.

Ten Years #48: Opeth

Posted on May 20, 2013 by necromoonyeti

Decade of last.fm scrobbling countdown:
48. Opeth (640 plays)
Top track (26 plays): The Devil’s Orchard, from Heritage (2011)

When I saw Opeth was coming up next, I got pretty excited about what the top track would be. Would my really oldschool Opeth credentials shine with a song like The Twilight is My Robe or Advent topping the charts, or could nothing hope to match Demon of the Fall? A Heritage track was the last thing I ever expected. It’s easy to forget, in the onslaught of relatively poor reviews, how much I actually enjoyed that album when it came out. Oh, it wasn’t love at first listen, but for me it was a breath of fresh air after years of diminishing faith in Akerfeldt’s song-writing ability. Opeth was one of the first metal bands I ever listened to, and, nostalgia aside, I really do think their first three albums were by far their best. A void, beginning subtly with Still Life and expanding more drastically after Blackwater Park, had grown between my personal tastes and the direction Akerfeldt was steering the band. This coupled with what I perceived as an overinflated ego to completely erode my interest in the band for a long time. Ghost Reveries and Watershed only managed four and three listens respectively before I yawned and moved on.

I am not much of a progressive rock fan, but with Heritage I did start to feel like Akerfeldt was coming back to earth and keeping it real again. I don’t know about his whole “I’m done with metal” mentality; it seems to me like he’s exactly where he needs to be to start composing the sort of metal I can enjoy again. But even if prog rock is all that’s going to appear under the Opeth moniker for a long time to come, his decision to tone things down has successfully resurrected my interest. The Devil’s Orchard is my most played Opeth song because these charts do not begin until 2003; a few years earlier and the statistics would reflect something quite different. But suffice to say I do think this is the best Opeth album since Blackwater Park.

I’ll leave you with a classic Opeth track of the sort that made these guys, for a pre-last.fm period of four years or so, my favorite band in the world:

Ten Years #49: Matt Uelmen

Posted on May 18, 2013 by necromoonyeti

Decade of last.fm scrobbling countdown:
49. Matt Uelmen (623 plays)
Top track (597 plays): Tristram, from Diablo (1996)
(This sample is the extended–and improved–version appearing in Diablo II.)

The Diablo series managed to evade me in its first two installments, and not for lack of effort on my part. A combination of a panophobic mother in the first instance and an outdated PC in the second restrained my computer gaming experience to Starcraft and Age of Empires. But that didn’t stop me from acquiring the soundtrack. I might have downloaded Tristram in mp3 format as early as 1997, when MIDI replicas were still a viable alternative. (The first mp3 I ever downloaded was Harvey Danger’s Flagpole Sitta. I actually remember this!) At any rate, it is my indisputable favorite song ever. Sorry …And Then There Was Silence. You’ll have to settle for indisputable second. I probably listened to Tristram thousands of times as a teenager before last.fm existed, and even in the past ten years it has drastically exceeded all other songs on my charts. (Compared to 597, my third most listened song is at a measly 255.)

I am not a huge Matt Uelmen fan overall. The numbers attest to that. But this song reaches a level of ambient perfection that has never been achieved before or since. I don’t have much to say about it, save that if you don’t like it I question your humanity. This is the only artist that has climbed his way into my top 50 based on a small selection of songs, let alone based on one single track.

Ten Years #50: Orchid

Posted on May 17, 2013 by necromoonyeti

Decade of last.fm scrobbling countdown:
50. Orchid (601 plays)
Top track (91 plays): Le Desordre C’est Moi, from Chaos Is Me (1999)

I always thought the first two tracks to Orchid’s debut album would make amazing final boss battle music for a video game. Maybe that’s a bit of a stretch, but I did first take an interest in screamo and related genres on a defunct video game forum that had awkwardly evolved into an informal music-sharing site. (The same one I met Arleigh and and pantsukudasai56 on.) A friend of mine there who would go on to become the vocalist for Mesa Verde was really getting into the genre around the same time that I was first exploring black metal, and we traded a lot of recommendations. It’s made the recent surge of screamo-black metal cross-over bands like Liturgy and Deafheaven peculiarly nostalgic for me.

Orchid was a short-lived but especially influential band in the scene, lasting from 1998 until 2002. Most of its members went on to form the really solid and entirely out of character rock band Panthers afterwards. I will be eternally amused that Jayson Green noticed my Orchid shirt at one of their gigs.

Ten Years of Music: Introduction

Posted on May 16, 2013 by necromoonyeti

On May 16th, 2003, I entered an email address and password into a little known site called Audioscrobbler and clicked join. Having always derived an enormous kick from statistics, the novelty of being able to track everything I listen to seemed like the best idea on the entire internet. Ten years and approximately 180,000 songs later, that opinion hasn’t much changed. Most of you are probably familiar with what is now Last.fm, but I doubt as many have diligently kept up with it over the years. From my car cd player to everything I listen to at home, I’m willing to wager that a good 90% of the music I’ve enjoyed over the past decade has been accurately logged. This creates some pretty interesting possibilities. I’ll never know what I listened to most as a kid. Wishful thinking tells me Pearl Jam, Tool, Nirvana, and the Smashing Pumpkins would have topped that list. (Honesty admits with some embarrassment that Korn ranked just as high.) But I do know what I have listened to the most as an adult. It’s not biased speculation; it’s a fact.

Most of my entries here on Shattered Lens have dealt with either reviews of new albums or ramblings and investigations isolated to the fairly particular subgenres of folk, metal, and video game music that excite me most. While my last.fm charts reflect this, they are substantially more diverse. What I would like to do over the following two months is introduce some of you to a range of stellar bands and songs by allowing the numbers to speak for themselves. I intend to count down the top 50 bands I have listened to in the past decade and feature my most played track from each. I’ll start with the highest five bands that didn’t quite make the cut:

55. The Microphones (551 plays)
Top track (60 plays): The Moon, from The Glow, Pt. 2 (2001)