Band:	Agalloch
Album:	The White
Style:	Neofolk
Release date:	February 29, 2008
A review by:	Troy Killjoy

01. The Isle Of Summer
02. Birch Black
03. Hollow Stone
04. Pantheist
05. Birch White
06. Sowilo Rune
07. Summerisle Reprise

Everyone could use a 30-minute break to contemplate the beautiful, harrowing, and miraculous nature of life, and Agalloch are here to provide exactly that break.

Being renowned in the metal community and lauded by fans of extreme, yet thoughtful music, managing to seamlessly incorporate the dark tranquillity and electro-soundscape-infused neofolk into their brand of melodic and atmospheric black metal, adding traces of gothic and doom influences throughout, John Haughm and co. decided instead to release an EP focusing primarily on their reflective inspiration based on an amazing Scottish mystery thriller film* about an isolated pagan cult. And, as a result of its influence, this mini-release flows as if it were written as a movie, with a clear vision not only of a beginning, middle, and end, but of a particular mood. And if at this point that doesn't sound exactly like something you'd expect from this band, then clearly you haven't been along for the journey for very long.

Ethereal choirs, haunting chants, and a spoken word style of "singing" make up a decent portion of the music on this EP, but that's just a microcosm of the mood presented. Acoustic guitars take over the majority of responsibilities completely, as any semblance of metal is completely disregarded, and while the tone comes across momentarily playful depending on which chapter of their story you find yourself listening to, the overall tale is absolutely dreadful. The design of each song caters to your most provocative, remorseful, blissful, and wistful memories, effortlessly capturing each and every emotion you didn't even know you had, some buried deeper than you could consciously realize, until you're forced to face every bit of the iceberg you've carefully kept hidden beneath the surface over years of self-neglect and unacknowledged depressive tendencies. It's as if, for a brief moment in time, you're connecting with someone who gets you without ever having met you, because no matter if you can admit it or not, those kinds of emotions live inside us all.

Piano backdrops weigh down the oppressive atmosphere even further, like a ton of bricks cascading over your crushed body -- soul, more like -- and a few vocal samples from said film (*the original Wicker Man, for anyone unaware) reveal themselves near the end because this isn't already burdensome enough. But to get an idea of the music, as opposed to the message, or the feel, or the concept, one only needs to compile all the depressive, atmospheric, melodic, folkloric moments of Agalloch's full-length releases, and play them back as if listening to a carefully selected, prearranged, rendered version of that compilation, and there you have The White EP.