A Black Metal/Folk Metal band hailing from Courtenay, Vancouver Island, British Columbia, the two-piece outfit Skagos has earned substantial acclaim for a slim discography highlighted by debut album Ást, a split with Panopticon, and sophomore effort Anarchic. Skagos' songs are fairly clean by black metal standards, with lots of influence from Folk Music, Post-Rock, Progressive Rock, and Ambient Music.
Members
- Ray Hawes - Bass, Vocals
- Isaac Symonds - Guitars, Drums, Vocals
Discography
- Demo 2007
- Himmelszelt (split with Tomhet, 2008)
- Ást (2009)
- Litha MMIX (EP, 2009)
- The Groan of Ancient Pines (split with Wake, 2009)
- Skagos/Panopticon (split, 2010)
- Anarchic (2013)
Tropes
- Album Intro Track: "Colossal Spell".
- Anarchy Is Chaos: Averted throughout, as the band are green anarchists.
- Black Metal
- Broken Record: "Rain will fall and fall" from "Blossoms Will Sprout from the Carcass".
- Cover Version: "...of This Empty Land" is actually a cover of Wolves in the Throne Room's "Vastness and Sorrow". Two mixes of this track are available floating around the internets, one of which lacks vocals or drums.
- Drone of Dread: "Colossal Spell", most prominently.
- Epic Rocking: All over the place, but Anarchic has to take the cake, with seven movements totalling up to over sixty-six minutes of music. Depending on the release format, it has either two or three tracks, although a particularly enterprising individual can take the two versions and stitch them together into a continuous suite of music because the song divisions are in different places in the different versions. As with several other Cascadian bands, though, it's rare for a song to last less than ten minutes.
- Fading into the Next Song: On the cassette version of Ást, "The Drums Pound Every Night in a Glorious Celebration of Life" fades into "Blossoms Will Sprout from the Carcass". On all other releases of the album, the songs are separate.
- Folk Metal
- Green Aesop: Many songs have environmentalist themes.
- Instrumentals: "Colossal Spell", "...with a Warm Recollection", some mixes of "...of This Empty Land", "Anarchic V: Corvidae"
- Literary Allusion Title: The band is named after an island from A Song of Ice and Fire whose inhabitants are reputed to be cannibals.
- Non-Appearing Title: Most of them. The subtitle of "Anamnesis II" appears in the song, as does "The Drums Pound Every Night in a Glorious Celebration of Life". Other titles (i.e. "Blossoms Will Sprout from the Carcass") reflect the content of the lyrics, but don't appear directly.
- Post-Rock: A major influence on the band. Beyond that, movements four and five of Anarchic (side B of the digital release; the end of track 1 and the start of track 2 of the cassette and CD releases) are a straight example of this genre, with no traces of metal anywhere to be found.
- Precision F-Strike: In "Caliginosity".
- Shout-Out: "Caliginosity" uses the phrase "Freezing Moon", which is the title of one of Mayhem's most famous songs, in its final stanza.
- Siamese Twin Songs: How the movements of Anarchic are connected, apart from track breaks. "Colossal Spell" is also connected to "The Drums Pound Every Night in a Glorious Celebration of Life" in this manner.
- Sliding Scale of Libertarianism and Authoritarianism: Firmly at the libertarian (anarchist, to be more precise) end.
- Soprano and Gravel: The band combines the traditional Harsh Vocals of black metal with folk harmonies and various other styles of clean singing.
- Spell My Name With An S: "Colossal Spell" is misprinted on some issues of Ást as "Colossal Spel". According to the band, this was a typo. The most recent printing of the album (the vinyl edition) has it spelt correctly.
- Surprisingly Gentle Song: "...with a Warm Recollection", "Anarchic IV-V"
- We All Die Someday: "Blossoms Will Sprout from the Carcass", as its title might imply, is about how death is necessary for the continuation of life.
