Earth at Myspace

Earth’s masterpiece “Earth 2” was the archetype of all drone doom metal records and throughout their career as a band they’ve always done something new on each album. Again they’ve broken new ground as rather than go back to square one and create a new sound for “the bees made honey in the lions skull” they’ve built upon the approach they created for their previous album “Hex or the Infernal Printing Method” and improved it immensely.

“Hex or the Infernal Printing Method” was one damn good album in itself with more replay value than that youtube video of the toddler getting somersaulted into the air by a breakdancer but “the bees made honey in the lion’s skull” is a step beyond that. It takes the bizarre frontier ambience of that album and simultaneously refines and makes sound more alive with that sense of the great unconquered wilderness that you only get with latter day Earth records.

The clean minimalist riffs fused with the hypnotic percussion and subtle piano and organ creates a style of music that isn’t really metal but then again can’t really be anything else. If you add some distortion to the guitars and produce it in a different way you’d have something undeniably metal but then that would take away the beauty and ambiguity of this record. This is a bizarre sound to describe but the nearest I can get is the primal spirit of Black Sabbath co-existing with the classical avant-garde minimalism of Phillip Glass, the haunting country instrumentals of Duane Eddy and a nod towards the post rock of Slint. You can still hear the concepts that Earth introduced to metal and that were since taken up by Boris, SunnO))) and Cult of Luna to name but a few. It’s a Metal album but not as we know it Jim!

Thursday, July 24th, 2008 @ 9:38 am Doom Metal
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