Oscillotron "Oblivion" (2024)

This artist made quite an impression on me! Their crafty approach to dark atmosphere through delicate, minimal synths has been a delight to return to over the years. Now trading in the stellar visions of astral tension and alien mystique, Oscillotron returns eight years on to abandon inspired compositions in favor of a dull monotonous drone.

 

Oblivion is unrecognizable, a reeking fuzz of noise to drown too. A blurry haze of hellish bass distortion, muddling through the cracks within its own distortions. The wall of sound makes for brooding, ominous tension, until a few minutes in you realize this is the entire hour, offering rumbles and blemishes as its only discernible distinctions.

 

Drone Metal isn't my cup of tea and the bleak aesthetic on offer does little to impress as a lone offering. Although crafting this particular growl might have been a feat to accomplish, its enduring stay is not. Unlike some other spacey drones I have enjoyed, this pale vibe feels hollow an empty in comparison, a drab rot to rid oneself of.

Rating: 0/10

Earth "Earth 2: Special Low Frequency Version" (1993)

 

A recent revival of Hibernaculum and The Bees Made Honey had me curious about their pre-reformation works that had been heaped with praise. As a curious teenage enthusiast, this record had left me dumbfounded to what the fuss was about. Now, with open mind and ears I find myself with a similar sentiment, although context may play a roll given what this anomaly may have meant to listeners back in the nineties.

With three gargantuan songs totally seventy three minutes, Earth 2 strikes me as more of a singular experiment in tone than anything structured, planned or even designed. This is Drone Metal resembling very little of Metal and much of the drone one might associate with engine noises and electronic buzzing. The entire musical piece is a wash with the dense, drowning, fuzzy flood of guitar distortion cycled with amp feedback to muzzle anything that happens to wander across its bleak path.

Admittedly I can comment there is a strange charm and allure to the droning noise but is it a work of genius? I suspect not. As background or foreground music it is mostly grating and is best enjoyed when entirely distracted from its presence. Perhaps its just not my cup of tea. I understand the appeal but the particular aesthetic at play here is mostly a discomfort that feels pointless to endure its unsettling presence.

With Seven Angels, a lone guitar deploys burly riffs reminiscent of Black Sabbath on loop. Slowly chugging palm mutes and rising to chord slabs with slices of short melody, it stands aside for offering something to focus on yet feels unremarkable to me. The second track shifts aesthetics slightly, the guitar work goes in a moody direction but ultimately its emotions are smothered by the droning, dirty sludge.

 Its not until Like Gold And Faceted that we hear drums, slow, temporal and disappearing for tempo shattering duration's, they barely crash through the wall of brown sound. At the hour mark, a scream can be heard and before it, a little lead guitar but as mentioned, these events do little to conjure purpose or intent. I must say, it does sound like cryptic rumblings are woven beneath the drone at times where its consistency breaks and cracks of something else is heard, undecipherable.

The whole thing seems like an unplanned session hinged around the concept of smothering the listener in blistering feedback for an unreasonable amount of time. Its spontaneous blurts of additional sound seems disconnect and purposeless. If there is magic to be found here, it has certainly alluded me, although I suspect the aid of hallucinogenics might yield different results for those who use them.

Rating: 2/10

Earth "The Bees Made Honey In The Lion's Skull" (2008)

With the pandemic slowing the pace of new music by the artists I follow, I've noticed the freed time has had me picking out forgotten treasures. It is much fun to revisit old favorites and after blowing the dust of Hibernaculum we get to revive the one about the bees and the lion! I never got deep into this one upon release and the reason is swiftly apparent - Its all to similar. Earth's slow, drudging pace and methodical unraveling of suspended, elongated chords and melodies brews a warm atmosphere. Once familiar with the niche, it dissipates too a mood, one to be conjured but hardly encapsulated by.

With its axis a little more woven into the softly distorted guitars, texture and aesthetic ooze from the speakers as its melodies clime to unleash brooding chords that ring out in slow motion. In its simplicity, amalgamating layers of ambiguous hazy noise gush forth from its crashing power. Heard best in its opening songs, the charm wears off as future songs pivot more so to the piano as the lead instrument and in this relegates itself to a less imbued form.

Rise To Glory introduces a remarkably hazy guitar solo that ebbs and flows in its shoe-gazing presence, sluggish and reflexive, its grasp on tension and human expression is suddenly cut short as a sudden pivot ushers in the pianos phase. Hung From The Moon goes there again with the piano but its not quite the same. This additional layer, free from the grinding pace yet flowing with a complimenting looseness is wonderful, a stand out element that doesn't get much time to flourish. With this they had something but without, its all to similar and the record tends to drift to the background, where it sets a fine and soothing mood of calmness and ease. A good record but its clear now why it didn't stick with me back then.

Rating: 6/10

Earth "Hibernaculum" (2007)

 

Here lies a blast from the past, one of my first steps into the worlds of Drone and Doom. Earth are known as pioneers in the field and Hibernaculum comes in the second leg of the duo's carrier after reformation a few years prior. To me this four track EP was a hypnotic exercise in simplicity and repetition that pushed its gradual shifts in tone and texture as the progressive archetype. Its entrancing mood was one I'd enjoy on many long walks home in the dark, I couldn't however convince my friends of its magic but with it passing my mind again recently, I have revived its wonder to my playlist to share with all of you through this music blog.

With the aged ears acquired since, I hear the likes of Noir Jazz as a distant cousin to this breezy, soft and natural record. Steeped in a neutral tone it feels rather adaptable to either the city night or natural beauty in the light of day. Its first three songs deliver gorgeous metallic acoustic guitar melodies. Drawn out at a snails pace its repetitious ideas are underpinned by chilling piano notes and the bellowing dense blanket of bass. Slow and methodical its incremental growth blossoms so slowly its like watching a face age day by day yet in the calming spell of its manor, an intensity manifests with its lurching distortion and subtle organs chiming in on the craft.

Its final song, clocking in at over sixteen minutes takes the temporal to its conclusion. The soft percussion performance of Adrienne Davies is drawn to a crawl as the textures of her cymbal strikes cry out in the void between lingering notes from a darkly guitar. A Plague Of Angels plunges into the chill of night where its counterparts exerted a sense of natural beauty, this one slides into the shadows, devoid of light yet still having this calming persuasion. Being able to hold the listener in its grasps, the gradual rise of blunt over-driven chords takes us into dramatic spaces as it grows bolder. It could be excellence in action, or possibly the countless hours of bonding that made it so vivid to me.

I've written on Earth's more recent Primitive And Deadly, back when I first started this blog. Its a different beast, more metallic and doomly with charming vocals and all. That was one of my personal favorites from 2014. This fun revival of an old gem has made me realize how little of their discography I have uncovered, perhaps one to dive into now! Hibernaculum is a fine record, solemnly neutral with a slight chill in its backbone, the temporal pace and sluggish unraveling is a power of its own! One to always return to from time to time.

Rating: 8/10

Author & Punisher "Beastland" (2018)

 Lured in by a Noisy documentary highlighting this musicians use of beefy mechanical instrument controllers, I was warmed up to Author & Punisher through the Pressure Mine release earlier in the year. The project had drifted from my mind and so Beastland hit me like a tone of bricks. These monstrous droning industrial soundscapes of power and might play like a mechanical monstrosity facing the scorn of its creator. The pain and suffering imbued in the thick haze of flickering distortion is monumental. Its stride through the fire is wielding and burdensome as these pounding base kicks and snares fair through a wall of industrial noise smothering them with a cold, unforgiving darkness that every track runs through a different crevasse of.

The record opens on a tamer... yes tamer note, Pharmacide. Its construct a rigid design of peaked, distorted, jolted synthesizers culminating in swirls of unrecognizable sound as a dystopia atmosphere is laid upon us. Some how things ramp up with Nihil Strength and Ode To Bedlam as roars of crushing screams and thudding baselines lead an assault upon the listener. Although it roots its stance firmly in an ugly, brutal setting, somehow buzzing synths howling in despair create a sense of epic and growth against an unforgiving soundscape that is trying to drag everything down with it. The aesthetic is gruesome, every Industrial characteristic exaggerated into constant collision, masterfully manipulated by underlying songwriting that's smothered by the dizzying onslaught of ripping instruments, tearing into each other, fighting for space.

I'm truly impressed at how much peaking, distortion and incomprehension can be turned into a musical treat. Its utilization in birthing atmosphere is remarkable, if not hellish, dark, miserable and full of sweaty suffering. The crashing and thudding of militant percussion is at constant odds with overtly thrusted synths. Everything is competing for that glimmer in the lime light. With that a minimalism reigns supreme through a web of dense aesthetic chaos, the underlying music itself given its rise when time. The production is a marvel of itself and its songs have their individual markings with an ear for balance as its darkest avenues yield to respites and creaks of dark melodies in the attune moments. A visionary record fondly reminiscent of Post Self. Somehow its darker, meaner and bolder than that plunge into depravity.

Favorite Tracks: Nihil Strength, Ode To Bedlam, Night Terror, Beastland

Rating: 8/10

Bell Witch "Mirror Reaper" (2017)

Seattle based Doom Metal band Bell Witch have topped many lists for best Metal album of 2017. The artwork so reminiscent of Zdzislaw Beksinski and heaps of praise lured me into a record fondly familiar, its acoustic drones reminding me of Earth's Hibernaculum. Packaged as a double album it comprises of two lengthy songs totaling over eighty minutes of deathly slow and bleak Doom Metal that goes to the extremes of pace with several seconds marking the distance between the striking of snares and cymbals. It flirts with temporal timing and lets notes ring out and bellow as the distortion guitars, despite being fairly soft, drone out into a textural fuzz before the next strike is drawn. Its performance is impressive, the art of playing slow seems flawless as the group coordinate immensely slow tempos that seem organically stretch and sway but it is the lethargic nature of the music that makes these instantaneous shifts dissipate from focus.

Tempos aside, Mirror Reaper has a strong current of sorrow and sadness in its atmosphere which drifts between other worlds as the slowest moments yield little presences for melodies to pervade this somber dismay. In doing so an enticing atmosphere is illuminated by distant, sinister chants sung with a choral cleanliness. It does find its counterpart in drawn out gruesome growls, rumbling like a textural layer in the aesthetics. A few grisly howls an shrill screams erupt in one violent, conflicted moment in the music but it is mostly an instrumental affair as the sluggish drones of elongated notes crawls onwards.

For me, this album is interesting, indulgent and oddly soothing, however it never musters anything that quite hits the nerves and that is the same for most Doom and Drone music. The first track's opening twenty minutes is rather enchanting but as the song drifts inwards for grit and gusto its melodies and musters of aggression dispel that atmosphere. The second song is stripped back with faint guitars and ambient echos painting a chilling setting for a lone voice to sing a serine sadness with an almost heavenly voice. For all its beauty, the slow, spacious and minimalist approach sucks much of this away but that is a person preference. It drifts into a morbid, dirge organ solo that really drives home a current of sadness but at this length into the record my attention is a little worn out. I enjoyed checking it out and very much appreciate the brilliance on display but its not quite for me.

Rating: 5/10

Earth "Primitive And Deadly" (2014)

Earth are an American Drone Metal band from Washington that formed in 1989 and are considered pioneers in the field of Drone Metal. Over the years there style and sound has changed, evolving into a more melodic and Rock sound than their Drone roots, although still keeping the Sludge / Drone relevant in their sound. 2007s Hibernaculum caught my attention with its slow, sludging groves performed in melodical tones that created contrasting atmospheres of relaxation and intensity, since then i have been enjoying this bands output, and this album has certainly grasped my attention.

Primitive And Deadly sounds lush and vivid, capturing the textural depths of guitars that drone there beautiful distortion in graceful sludgery. The clean melodic leads share the space effortlessly as the two wrap and meld around one another. The drumming ever present, quietly retaining the pace of these slow burners with grace. On 3 this records 5 tracks, Earth introduce a vocal presence with exquisite execution, Lanegan & Qazi bring artistic, poetic performances to the fold, so tastefully done. There is a real connection between the instrumentals and the vocalists that add great depth to this record.

Through these slow burning numbers Earth build enigmatic & psychedelic soundscapes that have an almost rock-like feel to them. Maybe if sped up some of these riffs would sound a bit more so, but there sluggish dragging of these riffs create spacious atmospheres for these chords and distortions to ring out to great effect. Through these spaces the songs progress and build thoughtful and unresting moods that give this album and immersible quality. I'm ever so impressed with this record, I've been lavishing in these tunes. Earth have mastered their sound, and this record is a fantastic step forward for them.

Favorite Tracks: There Is A Serpent Coming, From The Zodiacal Light

Rating: 6/10