Revisiting Ragana's All's Lost is like going through old photos and finding one that you don't remember having been taken. At least that's the way it feels to me, and it brings back a lot of memories. Some good. Others not so much. All's Lost dropped at a time when I was in a transitionary period in my life. I had been moving around a lot and having to start my life over from scratch ever couple of months. On top of that, I had finally decided to give heavy metal a try after having actively avoided it for years. I didn't understand what I was hearing on All's Lost then, but it seemed like it was coming from a deep, aching place. Its starkness and rough agitation seemed like a total scandal, but there was something about it that was altogether natural and familiar as well. Needless to say, I wasn't scared off. I recently checked out the group's latest LP, Desolation's Flower, which they released last year through The Flenser, and it prompted me to follow up with the 2022 remaster of the band's debut. The contrast between the releases is undeniable, with their most recent album finally reaching the summit of form they embarked on as early as 2013's Unbecoming. But recognizing their diverging paths doesn't cause a reencounter with their origins to be any less vindicating. All's Lost is still unique, even amongst black metal bands who have fully embraced the shoe-polish admiring, Ulver aestheticist click who attained grudging acceptance in the wake of Sunbather. Their outlier amongst outsiders status is owed to the fact that the duo of Maria Stocke and Coley Gilson bring a kind of witchy, love-punk energy to pine-dwelling, rain-soaked, American third-wave black metal, normally associated with groups like Wolves in the Throne Room- a kind of vibe you'd expect from a Kill Rock Stars signee, rather than somebody who'd know about, let alone have a favorite album by, Panopticon. There are even parts of All's Lost that almost give me a glimpse of what might have happened had Bratmobile given themselves a corpse-paint make-over and decided to devote their lives to furnishing free musical therapy and emotional counseling to bats and other nocturnal creatures. There is a beguiling manner in which Maria and Coley approach the material and songwriting on this release that is playful, even naive. Like a youth running into the woods to gather ingredients for a potion without any clear idea of what they're looking for, nor the intended effect of the concoction they aspire to brew- they are simply being called by the abundance of nature to seek out its secrets, leaving their imagination to fill in the gaps as necessary. It may begin with make-believe, but the lessons that are learned through the amusement of exploration can become the foundation for rituals and a formidable command of one's environment in later years. After all, the basis of all magic is the belief that the unreal can become tangled, that all that is there is not apparent from the surface, and that there are depths beyond the veil that the vessel of this world cannot expect to contain. Similarly, there is something irreducible about All's Lost, that, in defiance of its simplicity, remains captivating even as the duo define their legacy and shape their fate elsewhere. The album doesn't stand in the shadow of their later work, as much as in its only dark arena of reverie.
