Agalloch – The Serpent & the Sphere

May 13, 2014 • Profound Lore Records

Fifteen-year-old me would have been so excited right now. I don't really follow Agalloch anymore so I didn't realize this album was coming out until after it was released. It's good that I didn't actually get hyped for it because as it turns out there's nothing to get excited about on The Serpent & the Sphere.

Straight off the bat I realized that the band has somehow taken a step backward, and this is just another plain old Agalloch album. It sounds like a band just going through the motions instead of trying to actually innovate within their sound, which is weird considering that their last album Marrow of the Spirit was kind of a departure with the extra black metal influence instead of their usual folky doom. I thought they would build on that more, but there's really only one section (on "Celestial Effigy") that you could argue is black metal at all. Most of the music here is more like The Mantle in terms of sound, surprisingly enough; we're back to more acoustic guitars (and I mean lots of acoustic guitars) and slow doomy rock (let's be fair—there's some fast doomy rock too). But nothing particularly interesting happens, for the most part. There are a couple pretty good rockin' sections like the main riff of "The Astral Dialogue", but overall there isn't anything that really stands out in particular as being especially exciting if you've heard their older stuff.

No, it's not horrible; I didn't hate my time with this album and there was a good handful of parts of it I enjoyed. It's just that if it had come out maybe six years ago, when The Mantle was still one of my favorite albums, I'd've been a lot more receptive to The Serpent & the Sphere. But today it does nothing for me. Obviously that has a lot to do with my changing tastes in metal; there's loads of recent music like them that's way more interesting anyway and even that aside there's just no reason to when just about all of their other albums are better. While this album did grow on me a little on the second listen, it wasn't enough; I don't really see myself ever spinning this one again. At least, not for a while. Current fans will probably still get a kick out of it, though; it's just unfortunate that I don't really count myself among them anymore.