The first minute of ‘My Garden’ opens The Spiritual Sound in dramatic and instructive style. A count-in of bass hits launches a storm of blast beats and noise, drops swiftly into a riff topped with squalling guitar before settling to a more familiar metal chug as the caustic vocals come in. When it hits the chorus, everything eases back, Dan Meyer singing softly over strummed chords and busy but muffled percussion. The great joy of Agriculture’s music is the way they make these abrupt shifts flow naturally. On their second album they broaden the scope of their sound while integrating its many aspects more fluidly.
The album’s title derives from the band’s T-shirt slogan/mission statement/mantra: “I love the spiritual sound of ecstatic black metal by the band Agriculture”. An assertion that appears simultaneously absurd, annoying, self-mocking, and completely sincere. The title track is only a thirty-second guitar drone, an atmospheric intro to ‘Dan’s Love Song’, a dreamy cloud of warm, shoegazey distortion and soft vocals. It’s beautiful. And if sonically it’s the most unusual track on the record, it also strangely feels like the closest to its heart.
Yet, while they combine many elements, it’s the exhilarating bursts of black metal that lend weight to the idea of their music as ecstatic. As ‘Dan’s Love Song’ softly fades away they hit you with the huge, fist-punching, riff of ‘Bodhidharma’. Here their wildly swinging dynamics are in full effect, after a minute of the most metal riff on the album they stop dead. Leah B. Levinson screams, “You look like you’re dying…” and everything gets very delicate, the vocal just above a whisper and the drums a slow march until a couple of sharp hits bring the riff back. The next verse floats on liquid guitar lines and the song’s final chords continue into ‘Hallelujah’ where Meyer goes fully singer-songwriter. This develops a band habit of playing a song both loud and then soft, here the mellifluous guitar accelerates, joined by a set of aggressively abrupt metal blasts to close it out.
You may have heard the joke that black metal is basically surf rock plus distortion (tremelo picking – yay!), but possibly Agriculture manifest this in an unexpected way. They are from California, after all. Their debut began with ‘The Glory of the Ocean’ and final track ‘The Reply’ finds them again amongst the waves, a tiny consciousness adrift in the vastness: ”Sometimes I’m lifted and sometimes they crash down on me, I’m totally out of control, with a mouth full of water”. Again they quiet down for the clean vocals, then crash into something more epic. Although they pull the loud-quiet trick quite a lot, they do it with great skill and variety. It’s consistently thrilling and the more reflective moments feel of a piece with the concentrated blasts of soaring metal. You might have to decide for yourself if it’s spiritual but it is undeniably uplifting.
