by Oliver on August 11, 2023 in Album
A year after the EP, which was hyped in scene circles The Circle Chant lay the Blackgaze high-flyers Agriculture their self-titled debut album: as promising as it is immature.
Los Angeles natives Dan Meyer (guitar, vocals), Leah B. Levinson (bass, vocals), Richard Chowenhill (guitar) and Kern Haug (percussion) carry their influences unconcealed at almost every point in time – they cook up their love for each other Liturgy and Deaf haven with a pinch Panopticon at times even close to the brazen plagiarism, adding a downright exuberant, wanting to inspire joy in this recipe.
The real problem of Agriculture does not lie in this phase of self-discovery, which is still in the process of successfully imitating one’s own identity, but in the fact that the potential that has been uncovered in the process can hardly be converted into really coherent songs – let alone into a well-rounded album: the super compact 31 minutes of this one Debuts neither find themselves nor get to the point compositionally.
Again and again, the amalgam of adapted influences gets in the way of euphoria itself, as the band always takes the option of making frustrating decisions with them when in doubt.
The Glory of the Ocean has to contend with at least one small blemish shortly before the end when, after the dreamy pedal steel intro by Nick Levine, the crystalline tremolo pulls in a country-like longing, a post-black metal beauty shines with hymn-like elegance from the pounding urgency to the sustained tempo, until the stream a la Hunt-Hendrix shoots riffs and screams in hysterical stoicism with manic directness – only the renewed step on the gas pedal after the full stop happens just too clumsily and abruptly, missing a really strong song an unnecessarily ugly seam.
Even more of a stumbling block is that which comes out of nowhere, falling completely at random from the rest of the context The Wellwhich straddles with clear vocals by Meyer-O’Keeffe, seems like a droning, thumping acoustic post-grunge demo that fails because of John Frusciante, Justin Lunn and Chris Cornell: curiosity for the sake of curiosity?
Look, Pt. 1 however, ties in with the melody of The Glory of the Ocean and pumps a lot of euphoria, energy and power into the basic generic Blackgaze, so clarifies what is meant by “ecstatic black metal“ is meant – but why does the saxophone (avant-garde tropes with the helpless sledgehammer?) have to be thrown in so haphazardly and haphazardly, only to disappear again immediately?
The wind instrument is already ideal in the Liturgy-Fanfiction Look, Pt. 3 used (after the theoretically formulaic, but practically great attacking in spurts and structurally more challenging for once Look, Pt. 2 set the bar high), although excessive horn blasting alone is certainly not “free jazz”. But in the maddening urgency, the clichés reignite before Relate given the band’s Sturm und Drang attitude, it grabs you right away – even if the droning, modern vocals sound symptomatically a bit too busy and the breathing of the bridge with the final rush into nothingness is too predictable because of the same form of what feels like every song – and Agriculture together with all its teething troubles once again demonstrates that the quartet certainly has the prospect of being able to handle all the praise of the hype surrounding them. However, it’s not that far yet.
Agriculture by Agriculture
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