Sunn O))) - Life Metal

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Angry Metal Guy

I recently read an article in Science magazine that stated that 87% of all metalheads like metal. Interesting… And, of this 87%, 97% consider drone to be their favorite genre of any in the world. And this isn’t limited to metal. This includes rap, country, K-pop, hip-hop, cock rock, pussy punk, and foreskin crust. I mean, who am I to question science or math? The numbers are real and, with the help of Melissa & Doug Abacus’ counting beads, it all makes sense. What’s interesting about the article is, of the 97% of metalheads that identified as drone metallers, 98% didn’t know it. Isn’t that remarkable? To think, all this time, you’ve been a closet drone fan. A startling discover even I didn’t believe. Until now.

If you think my finding this incredible, fully-accurate scientific article at the exact time I picked up Sunn O)))‘s newest record is a hoax of enormous proportions, you are a fiend, a hater, and a troll. Fate is how I was able to come across this magnificent article, written by renowned scientists. Fate brought me to this article just as the opening chords of Life Metal‘s “Between Sleipnir’s Breaths” caught me exploring the world of GoT porn. Fate, my drone-loving friends, is a mystical force that lights your heart with wondrous colors. Like the brilliant lights of the “Aurora,” it can thwart you with a “Troubled Air” or light your life with a thousand radiant “Novæ.” Fate shouldn’t be trusted, my beloved droners. That is Life Metal. But, don’t despair, drone on, my friends. Through the sunn, the moonn, and the starry night skyo))).

As with all great scientific publications,¹ the claims need supporting.² For one, Odin’s Wild Hunt, screaming forth from the opening moments of “Between Sleipnir’s Breaths,” is like nothing you’ve ever heard before.³ Following the trample of those eight, majestic feet, the graceful vocals of Hildur Guðnadóttir hit the airwaves. Though an ocean leap from the throat-raping gargles of Attila Csihar, Guðnadóttir’s vocal contributions follow in like approach to her predecessor.⁴⁵ Once the vocals settle in, the song ascends to the storm clouds and rides the haunting torrent until it dissipates.

With its surprising female vox—versus the burly, male Hungarian’s—the opener is the only track of the album that has vocals. Though Science proves that the closer is the best track on that album. For almost twenty-six minutes, “Novæ” transforms from screaming infant to one whose eyes explore the outside world. Yet, like the guitars and bass, this child uses its virgin muscles in an extraordinary way. It combines brain with brawn to squeeze its tiny hand around an adult’s finger. When her eyes open,⁶ a new phase of life breathes through “Novæ.” A phase that finds Hildur Guðnadóttir in the front row once more. But, instead of vocals, she uses the power of the halldorophone. An instrument married to the layers and textures of Sunn O))) (((as science has shown)).

Between the other two tracks, “Troubled Air” is the best. Though not as memorable or epic as the closer, it’s a building piece that uses keys and organ in a Blade Runner-esque kinda way. This track drones along, achieving an explosive finale that combines layered textures with a whirling frenzy described only by peering at the album artwork. Unfortunately, the final piece is one of the weakest (and longest) tracks on the album. Though “Aurora” has that quintessential Sunn O))) sound that first enrapturing the world in ’00, it doesn’t have the staying power of Life Metal‘s two bookends.

While Life Metal calculates out to be 50% good and 75% decent, our key Science article states the greatest contribution the genre will ever give to metalheads across the world: dynamic range. In chemistry, the lower the pH, the more acidic; the lower the pKa, the more reactive. As per Science, these qualities are perfection for a metal release. That’s why Life Metal is mixed at DR2. The more compression, the stronger the product. Science, my friends. Yet, scientific reason suggests that Life Metal isn’t the best outing by Sunn O))). Though it is more “feel good” than previous releases. For 97% of the population, this will be pure satisfaction. For the other 12%, this might bore them. I can’t wait for part two, coming out later this year!

Rating: 2.5/5.0
DR: 2 | Format Reviewed: 1411 kbps WAV
Label: Southern Lord Recordings
Website: sunn.bandcamp.com | sunn.southernlord.com | facebook.com/sunnthebandofficial
Releases Worldwide: April 19th, 2019

Written by: Dear Hollow

Sunn O))) is not well received around these parts. When AMG’s distinguished editors and contributors were given the opportunity to review these droning doomsters, it was met with such reactions as GardensTale‘s verbal bitch-slap “I’d rather stick my hand in a blender” or Mark Z.‘s sick burn “Can I just review my washing machine running for two hours instead?” Love ’em or hate ’em, we can all agree on one universal idea about drone: it can be boring as fuck. Our “Sunn-y” side up Seattle pals Greg Anderson and Stephen O’Malley provide an “eggs-act” (hey-o!) snapshot of the scene itself in their offerings, ranging from the excellent sinister blackened tones of Black One and the enigma of Monoliths & Dimensions, to the pathetically limp White1 and White2 and the shooting-your-shot-and-defs-missing Kannon—all varying quality, but regardless saturated in six feet of droney fuzz. So will the ninth full-length and blandly titled Life Metal breathe new life into metal?

Life Metal by SUNN O)))

The whole point of drone and drone metal, as I heard somewhere, is not to be catchy but to catch you. Groups like Earth, Black Boned Angel, and Horseback have unique and visceral interpretations of the genre’s core idiosyncracy: like, Black Sabbath riffs but like reeeeaaally slowed down. In that light, Sunn O)))‘s sound has always been a baseline of sorts in tone and execution, and Life Metal‘s plodding interpretation is no exception.

Thus, if you know these guys, then you know what to expect: Life Metal is classic Sunn O))) as you know them, consisting of absolutely crushing mammoth riffs full of droney feedback with opaque melody, ambient backdrops, and minimal percussion. Vocals have always been a wild card, whether it be blackened rasps, spoken word, or whimpered moans, and this album highlights isolated instances of Icelandic cellist and composer Hildur Guðnadóttir’s solemn croons in opener “Between Sleipnir’s Breaths.” Otherwise, with signature drone/doom sound bleeding through the speakers in what-the-hell-are-beats-per-minute fashion, I can say that, yep, this is definitely a Sunn O))) album.

Due to the expansiveness and density (perhaps monotony) of Life Metal and the project’s sound in general, it’s extremely difficult to pinpoint an excellent passage or highlight any given instrument. Its strangely evocative atmosphere, however, is its main selling point and clearly its most divisive quality. It’s difficult to judge objectively because what is heard in the yawning void varies from listener to listener. “Troubled Air” exudes a sense of peace and serenity, while behemoth closer “Novae” locked my mind into a sense of fuzzy bliss in its wavering tones. Overall, it’s clear that the thundering atmospheric soundscapes are the main attraction, and if you’re looking for subterranean crawls laden with layers of feedback and ambiance, boy, oh boy, this is just what the doctor ordered.

Sunn O))) does nothing bad, per se, and at the end of it, Life Metal‘s only crime is the fact that it’s drone and I’m conflicted by that. It’s definitely a Sunn O))) album, hell, it’s probably the most Sunn O))) album to ever Sunn O))) if you can discern between the tracks. It’s definitely a commitment at over an hour runtime, but it was not as daunting as I first expected. Gone are the subtle experimentations of their latest offerings and presented are the bare bones—there is something to be said about the droning simplicity and lack of pretense. I got something out of the expansive soundscapes, but I also understand that not everyone will. Its rumbling crawls are not for the faint of heart… or those who don’t like to listen to dishwashers for fun. Depending on the listener, this may be evocative or powerful, or it might be boring as fuck. Now what I don’t understand is why Life Metal needs a part two…

Rating: 2.5/5.0

The post Sunn O))) – Life Metal Review appeared first on Angry Metal Guy.

A Closer Listen

A good joke always reveals a particular truth about its object, whether in white or black form. The title of this album is a running joke in the band’s milieu, one that spans from simply going to exercise all the way to the concept of selling out. What it does, in its silly reversal of (death) metal’s fierce commitment to the void as absolute destruction, is find in the absence of meaning not a furious voluntarism but, simply put, a cosmic, sometimes mirthless, sometimes mirthful, laughter. In the mythologized images of nature it does not find the totality that black metal once sought – a sublime power of abjection – nor does it emphasize the patriarchal warrior stances of modernized Nordic gods; it finds, instead, a classicist fusion of beauty and the sublime, the path through which the god Loki transforms into a mare and gives birth to an eight-legged horse called Sleipnir, which would then serve Odin as transport across the universe. It is not the Norse tradition of heroes and death, but that of tricksters and life.

The first track, “Between Sleipnir’s Breaths”, is introduced by the horse’s phantasmal gallop, followed by one of the band’s signature massive, space-occupying riffs. Hildur Guðnadóttir’s voice adds a textural quality that highlights the soft edges of these riffs, the ways in which they’re always in escape, always flowing outwards, their volume not a function of oppression but of letting go, the grand exhalation of a laughter that comes to sweep away the remnants of a consciousness fixed upon the world of meaning. The poetry she recites comes from the monarch of Texcoco, called Nezahualcóyotl, and a mystic called Ayocuan Cuetzpaltzin, both Mexica poets of the 15th century for whom the facts of life, the very framework of existence, was adorned with the splendor of death. For both, but particularly for Ayocuan, existence was the “region of the fleeting moment”, its beauty tainted and ignored by continual attempts to grasp it, to control it, the vain desire to imprint upon it a will and a thought the ultimate folly. The “giver of life” which so fascinated Ayocuan will enter your house not through deeds and glory, but through the music of poetry and the paintings on your walls, which is to say through the ephemeral joys of living, forever in escape, passing away with every second. As the organ drone of “Troubled Air” emerges from this fleeting soundscape, the softness of the first track grows and shifts like the album’s cover art, the jagged growl of piercing riffs the aggression of the wind, the uncertainty of a mist that parts for no one. Laughter itself disrupts the air, and in its release of energy comes to fill the void around us with a vibration that is, too, forever in escape.

The last two tracks, “Aurora” and “Novae”, swing back into the natural imagery of sublime dimensions, for which Loki and the “giver of life” playfully burst forth as akin figures that birth something monstrous, something fragmentary, something that does not make sense and is yet beautiful: existence, a joke in itself. The drones in “Aurora” feel wider, even softer than those of the first half of the album, their flow an elation through which the sky seems to fall apart, its lights a record of another kind of energy release, another death that fills the abyss with blooming life. “Novae”, in contrast, goes back to the hardened, identifiably metal riffs with which Sunn O))) once made its reputation, the violence of this cosmic expiration a joyful reminder of the terror and the incontrollable elements of a laughter that has no end, its ambiguity towards meaninglessness a source of comfort as much as of misery. Half-way through, Guðnadóttir’s cello overcomes the guitar drones with some of its own, transforming the volume of the piece into something that does not fill every nook and cranny with sound; once the explosions have passed, there is only peace, a stillness that belongs to the final settling of cosmic dust. Just as it seems that we have entered death’s domain, however, the guitars flare up again, blowing up that dust to life, to cackling its way into the harsh, fragmentary, beautiful noise of movement.

Life is at the heart of metal, a beauty that many a metalhead would reject – too sensitive, too close to the feeling of giving birth. But it is also a sublimity that for all their romantic talk of nature, probably many other metalheads would reject as well – too wondrous, too close to the self-dissolution of being in love with the divine, as Ayocuan was. Metal, conceived this way, is made for us to admire the flowers and the birds, for us to dwell in the comfort of a friend’s embrace, for us to share the poetry of the sunlight passing, pretty much like the Mexica did (who, lest we forget, sacrificed humans to preserve life). To keep treading down this path could mean that the joke might be on me, but it would seem that in fact it’s on all of us who would describe ourselves as being alive. In short: thanks, Sunn O))), for all the laughs. (David Murrieta Flores)

Pitchfork 84

The titanic drone metal duo returns with Steve Albini for an enormous, meticulous, back-to-basics album that shows just how compelling those basics can be.