This gig promises to be a special night of deep experimentalism and introspection. After all of the recent sunshine, festival preparations and perennial gloom on the television, we’re ready to turn on, tune in and drop out, so the prospect of Earth playing live in Leeds for the first time in around six years is something we’re looking forward to very much. We head to the legendary Brudenell Social Club and turn off the world for a few hours.
Maud The Moth is supporting a solo set, which we did wonder about, given the amount of orchestration on her glorious recent album, ‘The Distaff’. Tonight, is an intoxicating mix of grand piano, looping effects, an all-important laptop, and, of course, her mesmerising vocal performance. Eastern lilts and operatic range glide on her heavenly Celtic melodies, and everyone here stands in silent reverence as she cleverly samples and loops phrases of her own voice, layering them into choirs in real time, as displayed in a gorgeous rendition of ‘Burial Of The Patriarchs’ bookended by birdsong. Maud The Moth then takes a swing into older material with only her piano, and it’s on this that you hear her heritage intertwining with her melodies. You get the feeling that the brooding under the surface is a storm always poised to erupt, and Maud The Mouth’s steely onstage performance is one of total power and fortitude. Older track ‘Empires’ (which celebrates its tenth birthday tonight) displays incredible dextrous musicianship as she glides up and down the piano with undulating tempos and crashing crescendos, giving way to delicate fragility in quick succession. It’s a truly masterful display. Maud The Moth finishes on the Bjork meets Diamanda Galas urban gothic ode ‘Turpentine’ and somewhat self-effacingly thanks us for our patience! I totally forgot anything else was happening tonight, in the world or ever to be honest. That was utterly enchanting!
To the uninitiated, Earth is a band fronted by one Dylan Carlson, a man who is credited with starting the whole drone movement and therefore funeral doom and any other offshoots that involve being wildly experimental and generally very slow. This is not music to mosh to sing to or do anything other than surrender to. Earth does melody, though, as opposed to Sunn 0))) or Bell Witch, who take a more tonic approach. Although tone is a huge part of the reason you go and see Earth. This is ASMR by means of guitar sound over slow bpms and strange time signatures.
Earth eschews their traditional two-piece format as they surprisingly play tonight as a three-piece with Bill Herzog on bass. Dylan promises us a mixture of old and new tracks, including cuts from the revered ‘Hex: Or Printing In The Infernal Method’ album. From the first notes, their country-tinged funeral march and deep reverberations take us all down very lost highways in an isolated wilderness and evoke wistful memories of things best left alone.
Deep, rich, fuzzy tones mingle with authentic Americana that stir visions of lonely cowboys in dead-end bars. ‘Land Of Some Other Order’ starts as a hazy acid trip that floats to a darker place as the distortion creeps up like a dark cloud. Tonight’s performance is an exercise in vibe, not songs, and as such is not for everyone, but if you get Earth, you really get them.
Brand new jam ‘Scalp Hunters Blues’ makes us forget where we are totally, and ‘Lense of Unrectified Night’ is introduced as a “countrified prog track that is in weird meters,” and we’re sold on the description alone. The drumming here is incredible in the fact that keeping a tight ship on something so slow and yet so technically challenging to get your head around is baffling, imagine Tool’s timing in slow motion in Texas and I’m still only about an eighth of the way to a decent description of how complex and yet on the face of it how simple it is. Earth is a musical paradox, something that fuses so beautifully and yet shouldn’t…or should it?
Fan favourite ‘Old Black’ gets a warm welcome, as it should. It sounds to our ears like what a slow walk home from a night in total oblivion would sound like, through a desert, barefoot. Halfway through its swamp groove, it breaks into an almost optimistic lilt before the crushing drama of the piece pulls you back like a giant, inevitable comedown. This is all a great thing, of course, because listening to Earth on record is only really half of the deal; you do have to experience them live. Not for any great showmanship or rock-out moments, quite the opposite, actually. This is all about subtlety and the secret nods and gestures between the players that you know have been ingrained over endless gigs and a tightly held common language that we’re not privy to. We’re treated to another new song in the form of ‘California and Other Impossible Dreams’, which is all ocean waves and sunshine until an unexpected, highly fuzzed-out and stately guitar solo takes us straight to Woodstock for a while before we’re pulled back to reality.
No, we haven’t taken anything, these polemics are purely induced by the incredible sound that three people on guitar, bass and drums can do with tone and feeling.
To sum it all up, which is challenging to do without saying, “You had to be there,” Earth is utterly extraordinary and rightfully legendary, and it’s a night that we will never ever forget.
Review By George Miller – https://www.facebook.com/oneflamemedia
Photos By: Thomas Hazlehurst
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