There are 9 tracks on this album. The album layout follows a pattern. The first track is a brief "instrumental", which is followed by a "song", followed by another instrumental, etc. Track 7, "The Hawthorne Passage", is an 11 minute instrumental; the last two tracks are a couplet of songs, the first of which ("..And the Great..") is an accoustic ballad set in 3/4 time. Incidentally, it's been offered as an mp3 on the The End records site before the release of the album.
The album's aesthetic rests on the principle of atmosphere. There are few if any obvious musical (tonal, rhythmic) modulations in each track. The Hawthorne Passage is the only clear exception. Modulations are important since they convey a sense of "change" in the music, of movement from one emotion, or scenario, to another. The result of this compositional dearth is that the songs in Mantle feel "longwinded". If you're an impatient listener, a listener with a small-scale sense of time, a listener looking for the music to do the highest number of things in the smallest span of time, a listener who misses the atmospheric property of an album, the songs will seem tedious. I sympathize. This album is "pale" in comparison to their previous LP, Pale Folklore. PF is the superior album. Mantle could be, perhaps should be!, an album about half the length, if not shorter. I get the sense that this album is really one or two good songs, expanded, bloated, like a balloon full of "atmosphere", to meet a time quota. Track 1 (A Celebration..) is more like an excerpt of track 8 (..And The Great Cold Death..). Then there is track 5 which is like a monotonous and shorter, less eventful version of track 3 (Odal). All these tracks could have been abridged without any detriment to the music, the music being as repetive and drawn out as it is.
That said, Mantle is inferior, in my opinion, to Pale Folklore, but it's not failure. In fact I it think it's brilliant. I accept the album's atmosphere, and with every listen the album- which I suggest should be understood as a single song rather than as an album full of distinct songs- grows on me. Indeed this musical monism is suggested not only by the themes in the lyrics, but by a) reprising accoustic passages, first introduced in track 1, repeated, though in a vague, ambiguous form in track 5, and magnified in track 8; and by b) the recurring effects-- the sound of winds, the singular sound of what's listed as a "deer antler percussion", which appears in the album severally.
My initial feeling was that the album is repetitive. Ideas didn't seem to condense. And, as noted, there is a lack of modulation within each track. If, however, one understands that the musical space is expanded to allow for atmosphere in the music, correctly perceives the album as a single song rather than as a manifold of musically independent songs, one begins to see the musical variation- the emotion- come alive, not only within each song, but mostly as an emergent property of the tracks. Each track, in other words, gains its meaning from its juxtaposition to a pre and proceeding track. The album layout, the alternations between songs and instrumentals, is a neccesary and deliberate part of the design.
The Mantle is an excellent *song*. It just happens to be over an hour long. Atmosphere in this case is good. It is the kind that seeps and soaks into the listener, every auditory pore, if one should let it. Agalloch's achievement is that they design meaning not within each track as per convention, but outside, across the digital spectrum.
