Top 25 Albums Of The Decade (#11)

11) AGALLOCH – The Mantle (2002)

Blind buys are quickly becoming a thing of the past. Nowadays almost every album in history is readily available through the iTunes store (just the other day I found Hawkwind’s Quark, Strangeness And Charm on there, which has been hopelessly out of print for thirty-two years), torrent piracy, Amazon.com track previews, shitty YouTube uploads and arcane distros usually run by some guy in Belarus. In short: the internet has taken the mystery out of record buying. Earlier I mentioned purchasing Funeral simply because it had a cool cover—a tactic that has served me well in my seventeen or so years of scouring record stores. For some reason all the best bands have a knack for choosing covers that perfectly embody the music within (Genesis come to mind—just look at the shit cover for Calling All Stations and compare it to the badassery of Nursery Cryme). Most of the time you know exactly what you’re getting, and The Mantle is no exception. Stark gray color scheme, bronze elk statue, antlers etched against bare limbs. Or just look at the song titles: “A Desolation Song.” “You Were But A Ghost In My Arms.” “I Am The Wooden Doors.” “...And The Great Cold Death Of The Earth.” Or note the song lengths (14:44, 9:13, 11:17), or that four of the nine tracks are instrumentals. Also note that the band is typically listed under “doom metal” or “folk metal” or—please don’t make me say it—“GRAY metal” (I’m still waiting for the first great “indigo metal” album). I myself have toyed with the following: Oak Metal. Melancholic Metal. Cabin Metal. November Metal. James Fenimore Cooper Metal. Legend Of Zelda: A Link To The Past Skull Wood In The Dark World Metal. Whatever I end up calling it, I have to point out that Agalloch definitely win the decade’s prize for Best Usage Of The Word “Panorama.” Like Ashes Against The Grain, The Mantle provokes polar feelings (pun) among metalheads. For instance, on the site metal-archives.com, someone named LordOfTerror calls the album “the musical equivalent of waiting in line” and awards it a score of 15%. Further down the page, a particularly alliterative systems analyst calls it “boring, bland, blathering babyshit (as in, of a consistently smooth texture, and made by people who are still breastfed).” Now that’s funny—and strikingly true. Chai Latte Metal, love’s poison. You can’t beat it, especially for only $9.99 at Starb-... I mean, the iTunes store.