by David Wilikofsky
Agriculture started with Kern Haug and Daniel Meyer. Both veterans of the Los Angeles underground noise scene, the two began jamming together soon after meeting. Those sessions eventually evolved into a project that strived to reflect the beauty of the human experience through heavy music. Soon expanding into a quartet (adding both Richard Chowenhill and Leah Levinson to the lineup), the band’s debut album gets this aim across loud and clear. The band use tropes of both black metal and other heavy music to explore the feeling of release that comes with accepting and submitting to forces beyond our control.
I’m far from a heavy music expert, so the finer points of how Agriculture subvert the genre expectations of black metal are likely lost on me. But as an outsider looking in, there are qualities to their music that feel different. I generally associate metal music with pure riffage and technical showmanship; you certainly get some riffage here and the band is obviously tight, but there’s a much clearer emphasis on texture in Agriculture’s music. The album opens with a steel guitar solo, an instrument that occasionally pokes through the torrent of guitar feedback that follows. Similarly, Patrick Shiroishi’s saxophone gets both a solo spotlight and a chance to weave itself into the larger whole. The whole record isn’t shrieked vocals and tremolo picking; alongside that you get sludgy passages, drones, delicate melodies. The music’s embrace of sonic texture sets them apart, feeling as indebted to the band’s experimental roots as it does to metal music.
In the press around Agriculture, a lot has been made of the idea of the band’s “ecstatic” version of black metal, subverting the genre by channelling its energy into displays of extreme joy and overwhelming happiness. Honestly I was a bit skeptical that this was nothing more than PR copy, but I have to admit that feeling is palpable throughout this album. The lyrics to opener “The Glory of the Ocean” are exactly what you might expect from the title: an ode to the mysterious power of the ocean, a song about how small you realize you are when confronted with something so vast. The track slowly builds to something matching the grandeur of its namesake, riffs rolling over you just like waves. There’s a focus throughout the album on these sorts of large, often ineffable forces, as well as a feeling of release when embracing both their mysterious power and your own powerlessness. By the end of the album, you may feel Agriculture themselves have transformed into one of these forces; they feel unstoppable, a band for whom the sky’s the limit.