At this point, I don’t think anyone would fault Agalloch if they decided to simply rest on their laurels. After all, their discography has been so consistently excellent that if the band were to just phone one in and make Pale Folklore: Part II, few people would probably mind. This is a band with absolutely nothing left to prove, especially after 2010’s nearly universally lauded Marrow of the Spirit.
album review
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 There was, quite understandably, a fair amount of concern among fans of San Francisco’s progressive black metallers Cormorant when the band announced that they intended to continue on after vocalist/fretless bassist/lyricist Arthur von Nagel left the band in 2012 to work on the Walking Dead video game adaptation for Telltale Games. |
 My first encounter with Murmur was in the summer of 2012 when I happened to see them in Chicago as part of a bill topped by Nachtmystium and Krieg. I was impressed enough by their set of kind-of blackened/kind-of sludgy/slightly proggy metal to stop by the merch table and pick up a copy of their debut CD, 2010’s Mainlining the Lugubrious. Much to my disappointment, the opiate-hazy black metal of that disc bore so little resemblance to the band I had seen on stage that night that at first I thought I had bought the wrong album. |
