review by: Roberto Martinelli

Of Stone, Wind, and Pillor is a five-track album of pagan black metal. The songs on this album are much shorter and simpler than the ones on Agalloch's previous work, Pale Folklore, and I don't remember liking that one as much as this new one.

The material ranges from a slow and heavy pagan black metal to soothingly somber atmospheric stuff that really isn't metal at all. The only really negative part of the album comes on track three, a cover of Sol Invictus' "Kneel to the Cross," which includes a clean vocal repetition of the line: "Summer is a coming, arise, arise." This gets annoying. The clean vocals resurface later on this track, where the nasal singer unfortunately makes me think of Oasis in his delivery. The good news is that it works in spite of itself, thanks to the urgency of the lyrics and music and the way that a staggered low rasp is subtly added under the clean vocals.

The overall feeling of the album effectively mirrors the Gustave Doré (the same artist whose work adorns every page in this zine) artwork of the packaging in its lush, earthy, sylvan imagery, making Of Stone, Wind, and Pillor not only an album that will lead to repeated listens, but consecutive ones.