For a band that’s spent the last 15 years gracefully and aggressively testing the limits of the sound that heavy metal makes, Portland’s Agalloch have committed very few errors. From 1999’s primitively produced but ambitiously built Pale Folklore to 2010’s arching and magnetic Marrow of the Spirit, Agalloch have twisted black metal into a fabric of folk reverie, classical grandeur and atmospheric washes. There have been exultant harmonies and disembodied howls, chamber music interludes and industrial noise ruptures, gilded acoustic fantasies and barbaric electric marches. From the start, Agalloch created new ways to work these disparate elements into complicated prog-rock forms—song suites, lengthy tracks, uninterrupted albums—while maintaining momentum. More than the metaphysical gaze of their lyrics or the relative mystery of their music, Agalloch has thrived on that rarified mutualism of immediacy and intricacy. After four largely flawless albums, that combination has made them a guiding creative light of American metal.
But Agalloch offered the infrequent human blunder with 2012's Faustian Echoes, a one-track, 22-minute EP. The band spliced samples of the Goethe play into a stepwise, rote rise-and-fall into loudness. The result was spirited, sure, but for Agalloch, it felt basic and empty, a studio-experiment stopgap that didn’t meet the enormous expectations set by the popular breakthrough Marrow of the Spirit. It upheld only one end of the Agalloch bargain. In retrospect, it’s best to consider Faustian Echoes a test run for legendary metal producer Billy Anderson, who’d been mixing the band’s onstage sets since 2010 but had never before recorded them in the studio. Anderson returns for The Serpent & the Sphere, the fifth Agalloch album. It proves that proves the folly of Faustian Echoes was worthwhile: The Serpent & the Sphere not only delivers the depth and development that have become synonymous with Agalloch but, across nine wonderfully imagined and vividly realized tracks, amplifies those qualities by often turning the amplifiers themselves down.
The Serpent & the Sphere includes some charged crescendos, laser-sharp leads and two of Agalloch’s most direct rock ’n’ roll tracks ever. But its tone is relatively muted, as though leader John Haughm’s grand lyrical reflections on death and cosmic rebirth cast a temperate shade across the music itself. Three of these pieces are pensive, classical guitar miniatures, written and performed by Ontario musician Nathanaël Larochette and supported only by faint whispers of drones and noise. “Plateau of the Ages”, the 13-minute monster that precedes the fingerpicked closer, is an instrumental beauty, as radiant as the best work of Mono and triumphant as the heavy metal royalty its piercing twin guitars suggest.
But it's the album's opener, “Birth and Death of the Pillars of Creation”, that immediately and brilliantly casts the record’s somber, reflective mood. For 10 minutes, Agalloch dances at the edge of eruption, using the promise of a climax as only a temptation. The quartet moves from meditative electric guitar murmur to earth-quaking drums, pounding against a pillow of keyboards and harmonies. In the past, Agalloch has launched from such lurking moments into black metal sprees. Rather than cash in, they use that move as a feint three times here, arriving always in a sort of readymade post-rock aurora. “By way of light across a vast millennia, I can behold this grandeur at its infancy,” Haughm whispers at one point, his words and careful voice perfectly capturing the nebulousness of both the introduction and album that follow.
These quiet retreats reappear throughout The Serpent & the Sphere—not only during the classical guitar comedowns but during the proper rock numbers, too. “Vales Beyond Dimension”, for instance, dips into quick, placid valleys between peaks of volume, with drums receding into a trot and guitars drifting into a slow gaze; the quiet, deliberate moments add power to the louder sections and songs through sheer relativity.
Agalloch’s expert momentum have always depended on an aptitude with dynamics, and on The Serpent & the Sphere, they've made it a science of patience and timing. After that slow-motion opener and a subsequent instrumental, “The Astral Dialogue” springs ahead with a mid-tempo, bass-heavy wallop, emptying without warning into one of the album’s few belligerent blast-beat blitzes. Agalloch maintain that seesaw effect, baiting difficult transitions with the eager feeling one gets while peering around a bend, trying to anticipate what’s coming next.
“Celestial Effigy”, meanwhile, ripples through a litany of ideas and influences, built into one uninterrupted, seven-minute flow. Haughm's guitars, along with and the versatile, brilliant playing of Don Anderson, dance in ornate rituals, flickering notes stabbing at distended riffs and pristine tones countering sheets of distortion. At once, there’s metal and prog, along with blues-rock and a little pop, too. You can practically envision drummer Aesop Dekker and bassist Jason William Walton nodding at each other through the song’s counterintuitive rhythmic shifts; at one point, the bass sits still, embodying a cold doom stare, while the drums sprint ahead, agile and unapologetic. That conflict epitomizes the separate sources of tension—quiet and loud, slow and fast, acoustic and The Serpent & the Sphere, black and folk metal, hard rock and soft comedowns—that allows Agalloch to be at once immediate and intricate. Even in these songs’ most placid passages, the band behind them never sits still.
The Serpent & the Sphere might disappoint fans of Agalloch’s more seething output. This is the band’s gentlest and most lucid album to date, and the musical knots that characterized Marrow of the Spirit’s long tracks have been pulled apart like strands of yarn. But Agalloch have never aimed for simply being brutal or destructive. Instead, their sense of shock has stemmed from their ability to surprise with unexpected wormholes and complementary contrasts, to build rather than break. In that respect, The Serpent & The Sphere is their most refined and generous album to date, an elegant trip to unexpected ends, as Agalloch continue to find new ways to reassemble and reorder their long-standing tricks. They're as singular and instantly identifiable as they were on Pale Folklore, but The Serpent & the Sphere reveals a familiar Agalloch that you’ve never quite heard—evermore patient, risky and, mostly, free of fault.
