Review Summary: Farmers Only
My intensely-positive initial reaction to Agriculture’s self-titled debut LP surprised me. For context, I’ve always liked blackgaze - as a fan of black metal, shoegaze, and post-rock, broadly speaking, what’s not to like? But recently, most blackgaze efforts have left me cold (and sadly not in the "freezing in a Norwegian forest" kvlt kind of way), feeling like markers of a subgenre falling into stagnation. To be clear, this isn’t an attack on the style in particular, given such a result is inevitable at some point in the evolution of every musical movement, but regardless, my fuzzy feelings for blackgaze are severely diminished at this point. Nevertheless,
Agriculture feels quite fresh.
All this isn’t to say that the album reinvents the wheel (as the old cliche goes), per se. Agriculture have some tricks up their sleeves, sure, but much of their success here is simply derived from convincingly reinstating the preeminent appeal of blackgaze - a compelling presentation of music drawing from the both the light and the dark, the heavy and the soft, an aural illustration of the duality of man and all that bullsh*t. Opener “The Glory of the Ocean” is just that, glorious, eight-plus minutes of folk (even country-ish) noodling giving way to stately riffs and absolutely ear-shredding vocals coinciding with gorgeous gazey melancholy. From there, it's on, with Agriculture going all over the map. “The Well” is a short and quiet tune with basically nothing to do with metal, leading into a chaotic three-part saga in “Look”, before a satisfactorily climactic closer in “Relier”.
It helps
Agriculture’s case that the album is slim and trim, barely topping the thirty minute mark, well-designed for re-listening. But this doesn’t mean that the album is overly polished and manicured - indeed, much of the record’s charm is found in its rambling sensibility. There’s a certain vitality of spirit which emanates from its periodic dips into unusual influences a la country and jazz, from the full-throated vocals which relay a bevy of different emotions, or from the off-kilter moments like the stretch in “Look (Part 3)” where nearly everything fades away before a blackened maelstrom brings us home again,
Agriculture is occasionally bizarre but always engaging, but most of all it’s a tasty treat of an album which has reminded this reviewer (and maybe you too!) that there’s still impressive music to be garnered from an increasingly tired subgenre.
