THE DEMONSTRATION ARCHIVE

First of all, this is a five star release for any fan of Agalloch. I can't say that it will be of much interest to anyone else, though, unless you're some sort of demo tape aficionado. Included are their first demo, From Which of This Oak; an unreleased 7-inch better known as an extended EP (more on this later) entitled Of Stone, Wind & Pillor; and their second demo, Promo 1998. These tracks are all taken directly from the master reels and sound about a thousand times better than those crappy cassette rips you pirated five years ago. Really, they sound great.

It's fascinating to hear tracks that we know and love from Pale Folklore ["As Embers Dress the Sky" (FWoTO), "Hallways of Enchanted Ebony" and "The Melancholy Spirit" (both from Promo 1998)] here in their nascent stages. The other tracks from the first demo ("The Wilderness" and "This Old Cabin") demonstrate the earliest roots of Agalloch's sound. The tracks from latter demo exhibit the band as being right at the cusp of the timeless sound found in Pale Folklore. The Of Wind, Stone & Pillor 7-inch represents a link between the two.

And now to clear a couple of things up:

It seems that a lot of people hold it against this album that From Which of This Oak and Of Stone, Wind & Pillor are incomplete; this is untrue. This release is intended to be a compilation of material recorded between 1996 and 1998, as evidenced by the title. The "missing" track from the first demo, "Foliorum Viridium", is still here as part of the Of Stone, Wind & Pillor portion. Having it twice would be superfluous; it is now in what I assume the band sees as its proper place in their discography. This brings us to the next bit: the version of OSW&P here, as explained in the liner notes, is the original 7" EP that never got released. The tracks purportedly missing here (our beloved cover of Sol Invictus's "Kneel to the Cross" and "A Poem by Yeats") were never intended to be a part of the original release and in fact not even recorded until May 2001 and September 2000, respectively, specifically as bonus tracks for the CD edition released in 2001 by The End Records.

... some also seem to think that "Foliorum Viridium" got butchered here and had a good three minutes or so cut from the end of it. this isn't the case. the observant listener will have recognized those same three minutes as being the beginning of "This Old Cabin". blame the gracious soul who provided the aforementioned cassette rip for this error.

good day.