Agalloch

It has been about a month since I’ve written one of these. How is that possible, with me not missing a day? Prior to going on vacation for a while, I had piled up a bunch of pre-written posts for you all to enjoy (?) while I was out. And then, when I got home, I managed to goof up my media server and then completely trashed the hard drive where all my music was stored! But I’ve replaced the server, restored my backup, gotten everything rolling, and I’m back in the saddle! The month off will do me good, I think. Let’s see!

Gaunt, “I Don’t Care”

I praise Gaunt pretty shamelessly on here, because they’re one of those bands (along with yesterday’s Hammerhead) that click perfectly with me. That, combined with the fact that they’re mostly forgotten today, makes me want to really push them on folks. But, I can’t make a better argument for Gaunt than what they’re making here today. This is just pure energy and tunefulness, and every bit of it makes me happy. I hope you love this song, I certainly do.

Prompted by it coming up during an off-blog shuffle, at some point The Beatles are going to come up here. I have all their albums, after all. Can you even find them on YouTube? I don’t know, I guess I’ll find out. Today is not that day, though.

Agalloch, “…And The Great Cold Death of the Earth”

At some point, black metal experiments with enough other instrumentation and flirts with folk enough that it really stops being metal, doesn’t it? Agalloch sort of sets out to answer that question, with this track being a good example. There’s really not a whole lot that ties it to black metal, but the band is still considered to be at least adjacent to that community. Part of it is the themes that Agalloch writes about, which are similar to some of the things explored by black metal bands. But if you played this for just somebody random who is knowledgable about music, it would be a while before they came up with black metal as a descriptor.