PALE FOLKLORE

Agalloch emerges in the late nineties from the forested depths of the state of Oregon (USA) with a musical proposal more expected from Scandinavian black or doom metal bands, and to which the North Americans add delicate homegrown folk acoustic textures, configuring a powerful and particular staging built on granitic walls of sound under a deadly and windy atmospheric mantle. And such a particular and interesting mixture is reflected in their first album, "Pale Folklore" (1990).

Using cold, depressive autumn and winter settings as a guiding thread, "Pale Folklore" traces its way from the opening, despairing "She Painted Fire Across the Skyline", a grand three-part suite dominated by John Haughm's and Don Anderson's protagonic guitar riffs that finds just the right pauses in its hypnotic half-times dramatized by Haughm's terrifying whispers, continues to flow between the deep melancholy of Shane Breyer's heartfelt piano notes and epic orchestrated keyboard backdrop on the instrumental "The Misshapen Steed", the powerful melodies of the disturbing "Hallways of Enchanted Ebony" and "Dead Winter Days", and reserves its final stretch for the precious acoustic interludes that oxygenate the spirit before the copious and distorted instrumental rispidity of the apocalyptic and heartbreaking "As Embers Dress the Sky" (recovered from Agalloch´s 1996 demo "From Which of this Oak") and "The Melancholy Spirit".

"Pale Folklore" is a splendid debut album from Agalloch, still rustic in style (some of the transitions seem a bit abrupt) but with a clearly (or darkly, rather...) delineated horizon, and which marks the beginning of the musical adventure of one of the most intense and emotive bands of the genre in one of its roughest sides.

3.5/4 stars

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