I didn’t know much about Agriculture before last year, when Living Is Easy plunged into my lap and gnawed me in half. It was the title track—a white-knuckled metal saga full of avalanching screams and ecstatic, glossy guitar—that did me in. At seven minutes long, Agriculture never lets up, coagulating in the tar until vocalists Dan Meyer and Leah B. Levinson puncture through, fists clenched. “In a forest with insects eating my body, I would not be afraid of that,” a voice bellows. The punishment strobes on. “Being Eaten By a Tiger” and “In the House of Angel Flesh” inhale the dust. The EP’s spoken-word finale, “When You Were Born,” ends in affirmation: “These words weren’t meant for you, but, one day, they find you through another.”
I’ve thought about the Los Angeles band a lot since hearing all of that for the first time. It’s music that pummels, demands. Meyer writes about nature and historical collapse through a Buddhist lens. Levinson writes about the AIDS crisis, queer texts, and how they both interact with and startle the present. Community and compassion ripple through Agriculture songs, but what’s left in the wreckage of resistance and myth is survival. In “Bodhidharma,” after sixty seconds of crunchy tremolo guitar from Richard Chowenhill, Meyers opens the blister: “You look like you’re dying. What do you need?” The song is named after the First Patriarch of Chan Buddhism (Chinese Zen), a monk practicing the Dharma, seeking nothing, and suffering injustice. The Emperor of China asked Bodhidharma, “What is the true meaning of the holy truth?” The monk responded, “Vast emptiness, no holiness.” Agriculture’s new record, The Spiritual Sound, contends with vacant meaning, cruel existence, and righteous presence. Everything just is in these songs. Agriculture simply are.
The Spiritual Sound is the best metal album of the year. It’s not abrasive or coarse, instead splendid and weird and possible. These songs tug on euphoria and affirmation more than catharsis, and Meyer and Levinson’s complementary voices and cerebral ideas fuse into each other. On side one, the band reckons with monotony in big choruses and punky, overdriven, headlong abandon (“Micah (5:15 AM)”), which gives way to this cleansing, fascinating plenty of stillness (“Serenity”) on side two. Meyer’s writing is almost supernatural, pawing at godly obsessions, while Levinson’s expressions are tonally resilient. That potent collaboration unfolds in delirium on “My Garden,” an intro track that detonates upon its awakening. Throaty, animalistic vocals curdle around lasering guitars. “My ears are burning, my body is burning, my mouth is burning,” Levinson sings. “Death is the ultimate fucker, death is the ultimate.” Perfectly, the track opens up and the guitars punch but don’t punish. Meyer attacks the bridge, “Now I know who’s in my garden, now I know what form it takes. Gone but never quite forgotten, I have found a resting place,” and the essence of Agriculture—a band agnostic to just one fashion—properly unfurls, as patches of shoegaze, post-rock, screamo, and thrash penetrate the black, persisting sirens.
“Flea” is similarly unpredictable and vast, tearing through a monstrous drum roll and splintering guitar, all while Levinson’s voice sustains in the underbelly of Meyer’s violent hollers. “Living rooms, they’re born again to men like ghosts attached to teeth,” she hums. “The words sting in passing, more or less.” But the vocal contrasts in “Flea” are replicated in tangential arrangements. The song’s true middle pacifies brutality with a sprawl of hazy bedroom chords, only to be shocked back into the torrent by Meyer’s charred, reflective yawp: “Where trust and love fail, fear makes a map. You followed it.” “The Weight” nauseates with a colossus of noise that’s disharmonious and deadlocked in breakneck riffs and protracted, bitter screams, while the phrasings in “Serenity” are more glowy, revealing Agriculture’s poetry: “My god is enduring this world every day. Each day, I leave God to it. No death could be worth escaping the timbre of this pain.”
The orbiting, songwriter-y “Hallelujah” ferments in indie-folk minimalism. Lyrically, it calls back to “Bodhidharma,” telling a story of him and Huike, the Second Patriarch of Chan Buddhism, and Huike’s amputation of his own arm in exchange for a pacification of the mind. Instrumentally, Meyer’s performance is one of note. “My head is on fire!” he sings, and his guitar dizzies with reverb. At the 2-minute mark, the song mutes for twenty seconds before building itself into this splashy, power metal coda. Closer “The Reply” has peaks and valleys, navigating avalanching abrasions with a lulling midsection. There, Agriculture sever their instruments and let the quiet feast. When Meyer eventually returns, backed by a lone guitar, his singing parallels the interchanges: “At the very height of the world they built, they destroyed it for no reason.” Where other parts of The Spiritual Sound would coagulate into mangled vocal bedlam, “The Reply” gets more harmonious, as Levinson, Meyer, and Emma Ruth Rundle unify into this beautiful, transcendent trio of hymnal voices. “Sometimes I’m lifted and sometimes they crash down on me,” they all sing. “I’m totally out of control, with a mouth full of water.” It’s one hell of a final image.
But every time The Spiritual Sound ends, I am sent back to “Dan’s Love Song,” which crawls out of the distorted, static-y, titular interlude that precedes it. Here, Meyer’s vocal soothes, once you locate it, and beneath a sludgy, soupy, disgusting film of noise, the band sounds like Pink Floyd in “On the Turning Away.” And the lyrics that collapse out of Meyer and into me are beautiful. “Just as empty skies are filled, every moment touches all of time” and “May you see that, even right now, so many years before you, you can be found and I love you” kiss me like perfume. It’s a colossal statement from Agriculture, a spiritual folksong spoken into a strata of pull-apart melody and harsh, atonal, neck-breaking bedlam that shocks but never quite overwhelms. The self is obliterated by conflict and put back together through trust. Beneath crushing, suffocating noise lies deeply melodic voicings and consuming washes of atmosphere. The Spiritual Sound’s textural versatility finds full consciousness in music that blasts with numbing intensity until it’s reborn into vibrance.
Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Los Angeles.
