The End Records
2006
Ashes Against The Grain
About This Album
Thanks to a pair of brilliantly executed albums in 1999's Pale Folklore and 2002's The Mantle (plus 2001's none too shabby Of Stone, Wind and Pillor EP), Portland, Oregon's Agalloch became, quite possibly, the greatest American black metal band ever, or at the very least, the first American black metal band that really mattered! Such claims should not to be thrown about lightly, its true; but why measure words when faced with the worshipful fervor with which extreme metal fans embraced the enigmatic quartet's inspired creations, featuring corrosive black metal spliced with delicate folk music into arrangements improbably fluid, majestic, and avant-garde? Oh, and the torturously long waits in between their releases didn't hurt matters either, only fueling the notoriously withdrawn band's budding cult legend, while their supporters dug in their heels for what wound up becoming an anxious, four-year vigil leading up to the arrival of Agalloch's third magnum opus, 2006's Ashes Against the Grain. Interestingly, as was the case with each previous effort, this offering displays marked evolution beyond its direct predecessor, so that, where The Mantle had incorporated ever-increasing doses of gothic and doom metal into Pale Folklore's original black metal-folk template, Ashes Against the Grain contains even fewer lingering vestiges (no more female vocals, for instance) of those acoustic guitar-dominated, Scandinavian backwoods elements.
Track List (try track 7)

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