Sunn O)))
Sunn O)))
Sub Pop Records!Β
The old adage βless is moreβ certainly applies to this album. Over our many years of reviewing, we have never had to do what we did whilst listening to the imperious Sun O))) make their debut on the equally legendary Sub Pop labelβ¦ we had to turn down the volume on our headphones! This latest outing from Stephen OβMalley and his brother in drone, Greg Anderson, is stripped of collaborators and almost anything other than pure monolithic power-chord fuzz and feedback. Indeed, the absence of Attila Cshar is, for our tastes, rather welcome as his gnarled incantations can sometimes take away from the pure ASMR stimulus of Sunn O)))βs high-gain textures. Without these other voices in the mix, you are left with the duo’s most direct version yet, and without many other sounds occupying their space, the result is simply deafening. We mean this in all of the best ways, of course.
On the epic eighteen-minute-plus opening fuzz feast, XXANN shards of feedback cut through the bed of layered tones like sunlight breaking through storm clouds. The continually shifting detail of the minor chord strikes crackling with tiny details that a casual listener (if indeed Sunn O))) has such a thing as casual listeners) might not notice. Does Anyone Hear Like Venom employs a top frequency that imbues its deep low end with a feeling of urgency and peril, and all the while, you can only lie back and listen, paralysed by the starkness of its delivery. It’s almost like sitting on a hill, watching the whole world explode, and being totally at peace with it.
Second single, which is a strange word to apply to the pure art that Sunn O))) produce, Butchβs Guns crawls towards a high-pitched tone that manages to not be uncomfortable as it’s expertly balanced by the blanket of warm vintage power that precedes it. Sunn O))) are only an easy listen if you are a fan of this style of music, but that is not to say they’re exclusionary in any way. They are challenging, yes, but once the listener is invested, the treasures of their sonic patchwork reveal themselves tenfold. The closest the duo have to a lead track on this album is the sumptuous closer Glory Black which employs a fairly up tempo, and this is in their world, to any other band it’s doom metal, repeating guitar motif that could be described as a hook if we wanted to sully this release with banal mainstream music vernacular, to take this one step further they also have what could be described as a middle eight by mere normal bands. This comes in the form of a fractured piano coda that brings a glimmer of faded light to the piece.
A dying bulb in a dankly lit industrial space, its melancholic, dull twinkle gives you some time to reflect before the crushing inevitability of pure darkness descends, killing the light completely. Then they leave us prone and blissfully concussed. Speechless in the wake of the magnitude of what we’ve just witnessed.
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Review By George Miller