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.

Inferni333 – I'm Still the Doctor

September 1, 2013 • self-released

Inferni333 is an acoustic-indie-rock band from Missouri. They also have an unhealthy obsession with Dr. Who.

Standard folk rock tropes apply (drums, acoustic guitar, bass, vocals) and the instrumentation is quite well-done. The drumming especially stands out as the EP's strongest point, and there are some good guitar moments as well (in the songs' intros, mostly).

But the songwriting itself is a bit simplistic and unchallenging; even with the short-ish runtimes it is all too easy to get bogged down in the repetition (especially "Death of the Ninth Doctor", which is the same four bars for over five minutes). Props for the string ensemble bits, like on "Bad Wolf", for mixing things up, though. I also can't get over the incredibly cheesy lyrics either, but then again maybe I'm just taking this way too seriously.

For what it is, this EP isn't bad. It's not really my style of music so I don't feel like I really should be any authority of whether it's any good or not. That being said, it's still free to listen to all over the place, so it's easy to decide for yourself.