- Country: United States
- Style: Black metal / Post-metal
- Label: Profound Lore Records
- Release date: 23 November 2010
Some albums feel like places. Marrow Of The Spirit is one of them: a grey, wet, wooded place where the light never quite gets through, and a record that seems more interested in weather, distance and decay than in riffs as such.
Agalloch made this one deliberately rough around the edges. Next to the cleaner Ashes Against The Grain, they wanted something grittier, so they went to Audible Alchemy in Portland and recorded with Steven Wray Lobdell on vintage analog gear. The difference is obvious. Guitars sound like wood and wire, the low end is allowed to blur, and the new drummer, Aesop Dekker, plays with a looseness that keeps the long songs breathing rather than marching. Jackie Perez Gratz adds cello, and it is never there just to sound pretty.
Six tracks, more than an hour. “Into The Painted Grey” is where the black metal blood comes back: tremolo lines that feel cold to the touch, a vocal that sounds like it is shouted across a frozen field. “Black Lake Niðstång” is the centrepiece, seventeen minutes and change, and it moves like a slow tide, pulling back into near silence and swelling again into something heavy and ritualistic. You do not so much listen to it as wait inside it.
What ties it together is a mood of loss without melodrama. The music keeps returning to physical images, earth, ice, fire in the dark, even when the words drift somewhere far more abstract. “Ghosts Of The Midwinter Fires” is the warmest moment, at least to these ears, and it lands like a hand on the shoulder after the long stretch before it.
Then “To Drown” takes it all away. The cello comes back, the song sinks rather than builds, and the slow submergence at the end refuses any comforting resolution. It is the bravest ending Agalloch ever put on a record, and fifteen years later the album still feels less like a set of songs than a place you visit in winter and leave a little colder.
Best tracks:
Into the Painted Grey
Black Lake Niðstång
Ghosts of the Midwinter Fires
To Drown
Author’s rating: 9.0/10
