Review Summary: Once again, Earth chill the hell out.
Between school, sports, and everything else, I’ve had a good amount of stress on my shoulders lately. I’m up until past 11 nearly every night working on IOC labs, procrastinating on Sputnik, and worrying about colleges, and there isn’t an end in the foreseeable future. In my experience, one of the best cures for stress is music, and no kind of music alleviates tension better than really f
ucking chill music. Music with a high chillness factor serves to shut off the mind to most of the outside world, sending one’s senses into a blissful sea of chilltastic euphoria. And honestly: what music could be more chill than Earth’s latest? With their signature combination of riffy minimalistic drone and Western music influences, it’s hard to imagine that these drone pioneers were the inspiration for exceedingly dark and markedly un-chill acts such as Sunn O))).
Earth’s latest kicks off with
Old Black, and the rest of the album does not deviate much from the formula presented on this epic nine-minute opener. The album is an hour-long tour-de-force of spacey, slightly distorted riffs over a simplistic drumbeat, all the while with a lonely cello playing in the background. The cello becomes a common theme throughout the album’s duration, and is an integral part of the music’s mood, and this mood is best described through setting: Imagine a sweltering day in the vast, barren deserts of Southwestern USA. The cry of a solitary eagle resounds throughout this landscape, and a rattlesnake is seen slithering under a rock to find a little shade. A lone tumbleweed blows across this vast panorama as Clint Eastwood’s heat-distorted figure slowly emerges into view. However, you begin to realize some anomalies to this picture, namely that Clint seems to be taking a hit from a massive bong (yeah, that isn’t actually heat distortion you’re seeing) and his horse is in fact a unicorn. This is Earth’s music. It is simplistic in the best way humanly possible, is barren and chill-as-f
uck at the same time, and is trance-inducingly repetitive. In an age where so much music is judged by the band members’ technical prowess it’s indescribably refreshing to hear music that has such a profound effect on the listener by doing so little. The best thing here is that even with so little actually going on this album never truly becomes a chore for the listener, as long as he is in the right mindset.
There are absolutely no bells or whistles to this album: it is just an hour of guitars, bass, drums, and a lone cello. There are no vocals, no ambient effects, no complicated structures, and no technical riffs. This could be a problem for some, especially due to the length of some tracks (the title track clocks in at over 20 minutes). However, the excessive track durations do not call for hefty attention spans; in fact, the music will be all that much better if the listener has the attention span of a goldfish. If you ever want to take this album in to its fullest you have to completely clear your mind of all extraneous thoughts, focuses, and feelings, and let the barren musical desert of Earth’s latest home run,
Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light 1, wash over your senses. From the waves of delicious guitar tone to the surprisingly effective incorporation of cello into the music (which is, in the end, the cherry-on-top that makes the album as wonderful as it is), everything about this album is perfectly supportive of a blissful 1-hour chillsesh. I implore you: put down that Ulcerate for an hour, relinquish that Mitochondrion, and immerse yourself in what will inevitably prove to be the chillest album of 2011.
