Year Of Metal #105: Ragana - Desolation's Flower
I don’t suppose I expected to come out of 2024 with a big time appreciation for black metal, but there we go. Just about everything in that subgenre, or its various atmospheric/symphonic/folk &c offshoots I’ve found truly captivating, whether the acts made me work for it or not. Exploring the style for the last time is one of the most recent records in this project, 2023’s Desolation’s Flower. Ragana are the rare (for my purposes) American black metal act, and give or take an Ulver, they might just be my favourite of the bunch.
The duo of Coley Gilson and Maria Stocke trade off lead vocals across the record. Gilson’s tracks are, in the main, more traditional black metal, This is an uncommonly progressive (politically) metal record written in response to the rising tide of American populist conservatism - we can probably expect a follow up sooner rather than later - and to say Gilson unleashes that frustration on their tracks is an understatement. The opening title track doesn’t so much vent spleen as tear out a full set of internal organs. The guitars are aural barbed wire, the vocals convey pain of every kind, the sound of someone screaming and screaming because there’s nothing else to do.
On “Ruins”, they take more of an insidious approach, with a creeping riff that keeps threatening to build to something a little more recognisable as a hook before stopping short. There’s a moment in which to catch one’s breath, before the song truly unleashes. The final minute features guitars so deep, distorted, and damaged that they turn to amelodic rubble before our ears, Gilson shrieking “I long for thee” over and over, starting off at a fever pitch but somehow finding ever more intense methods of delivery.
Stock’s lead tunes are, for the most part, heavier on the melody, and in the case of “DTA” especially a little more “standard” in their craft. To my fundamentally lily-livered indie ear, that’s a bonus - taken on their own, I probably prefer these tunes to the harsher, more violent raggedness of the pure black metal tracks - but that’s not to say they can’t go wild places. The aforementioned track sparkles from the off with some midwest emo-ready guitar arpeggios, but at a certain point the song simply corrodes. All the light is sucked from the speakers as the cooed vocals give way for a cacophony of panicked, indecipherable voices. The blasting guitars all but drown out Stock’s howled refrain, which could encapsulate the mood of the LP: “Death to America and everything you've done / I can't feel anything, I am numb.”
Best of the bunch, though - and maybe one of the best songs I’ve heard all year - is “Pain”. It’s a touch reminiscent of two of my favourite bands, Quickspace and Th’ Faith Healers. It’s by far the simplest track on the album, with an unyielding eight note riff and a wordless chorus. Tonally, though, it’s remarkably beautiful, with a mostly clean, melancholic verse followed by the gorgeous release of walls of distortion. It’s four minutes long and I’d be happy for it to go on forever. Stock puts in a dramatic performance on the vocals, her voice lovelorn and increasingly lost as the weight of her words, the strain of searching for connection (“I'm dying to know what it feels like”) overpower her.
This is an album of fantastic songcraft, remarkable passion, and purpose. I don’t imagine for a second Ragana are the only metal band expressing anarchist, anti-conservative views in their music, but it’s a reminder of how broad a church the genre can be at large. For every macho gun nut record, there’s a Desolation’s Flower, and that’s a good thing no matter what the genre.
