Welcome to the meandering musical insights of Aaron Joy (me!), formerly known as the Roman Midnight Music Blog. Here you'll find nearly 750 reviews of CDs & DVDs of rock & metal in all its variations, mainstream & indie, good & bad, U.S. & foreign. A new review every Monday.

Please share these reviews & feel free to copy them to your website or link to them. No downloads to be found here.

Are you a musician with an album?? Please e-mail me (aronmatyas @ hotmail.com) your album, EPK, etc. Or, hit me up for a physical address (I'm in Portland, Maine). If you don't have an EPK, I have a soft spot for personal handwritten letters from the local musician who just plays around town. I'm a bassist & do this blog partly to share music I love & partly to help the little guy, like myself, just looking for some attention. Promo companies are always welcomed to reach out.

You can support this blog by buying my books via amazon, or your local bookseller, or seeing my website www.aaronjoyauthor.weebly.com.

August 31, 2012

Sunn O))) ~ Monoliths & Dimensions (album review) ... All the sounds you've never heard before!


Style: experimental, drone metal, black metal, doom metal
Label: Southern Lord Records
Year: 2009
Home: Seattle

Members: Greg Anderson ~ guitar
Stephen O'Malley ~ guitar

Guests: Oren Ambarchi ~ bass/cymbals/gong/guitar/oscillator/keyboards
Dylan Carlson ~ bass/guitar
Attila Csihar ~ keyboards/vocals
Keith Lowe ~ double bass
Stuart Dempster ~ conch shell/dung chen/trombone
Steve Moore ~ conch shell/dung chen/trombone/keyboards
Julian Priester ~ conch shell/trombone
Mell Dettmer ~ hydrophone/tubular bells
Brad Mowen ~ percussion/b. vocals
Rex Ritter, Eric Walton ~ keyboards
Hans Teuber ~ clarinet/flute
Josiah Boothby ~ French horn
Taina Karr ~ English horn/oboe
Cuong Vu ~ trumpet
Timb Harris ~ violin
Eyvind Kang ~ viola
Melissa Walsh ~ harp
Daniel Menche, Jessika Kenney, Joe Preston ~ b. vocals

Sunn 0))) is a tough band to get the ears around & they surely won't deny that. Their drone metal creation is for those that want to break from traditional musical templates & move into something more hypnotic, non-melody oriented & outer-worldly. It's not for everyone. But, I've found a secret to moving one's appreciation, understanding & enjoyment of the duo up a notch - high volume. I wouldn't normally recommend such a cliché, & I don't think I ever have before, but it's absolutely true & this, what I consider their best album outside of their Altar collaboration with Boris, is an album for audiophiles who like nuance. It's also shows the band at what I consider their most creative & most breath-taking. As their most guest spangled album it's more than just a long droning chunk of guitar & bass distortion, but different instruments slide between each other like Phillip Glass or John Adams in a way that will be completely missed at low volume. I say this from listening to this album to write this review. At first I heard a bunch of guitar distortion with some male & female vocals. It sounded like every other Sunn 0))) album I've heard, which is about half of them. I like lots of shimmering sounds & vocals popping up, which is why I like Altar. This is not that different I realized, but you have to go to it instead of it coming to you. The key was that I looked up the list of players & was startled to see trombones, conch shells, percussion, keyboards, horns, strings & tubular bells in the roster. I couldn't recall hearing any of this. So, having already heard a hiss of distortion under the guitars, perhaps deliberate or perhaps not, I decided to turn up the volume a bit. I wanted to hear the sounds lower in the mix. Suddenly I heard horns lines I previously thought were guitar bits. I suddenly amazed by the subtle changes going on behind the vocals, how one sound melted into another, let alone how I couldn't distinctly recognize some of the instruments. What I thought was a long drone was made up of a lot of pieces & instruments. It's truly symphonic. This is what makes Sunn 0))) distinct from other drone metal bands. It's more than just bleeding distortion or music taken to the extreme end of a listener's patience. It's a wall of sound but its not a solid wall but full of windows & doors that just aren't apparent on first or casual listen. The irony is that I do my own share of experimental music & wonder if listeners get all the little nuances I either accidently or deliberately create. Probably not, as I myself now give witness to. I have to say I'm often lost on exactly how Sunn O))) create their music. How much of it is live & how much studio effects & cutting & pasting? The album gets the award for longest song title - "Big Church (Megszentségteleníthetetlenségeskedéseitekért)" -that means far more than the English translation gives. You don't even want to hear this pronounced. It's Hungarian, if you don't know, a language few are probably going to recognize written & its grammar rules do indeed create a word this monstrous. The common joke among foreigners is that it sounds like Klingon. It looks like that. It's a language I used to speak as I lived there, so I'm not showing off my linguistical arrogance here. The other songs are more vocally manageable: "Hunting & Gathering (Cydonia)," "Alice" & "Aghatha". This album is often the one many recommend for Sunn O))) at their creative peak. I would concur. Though, I didn't think it was particularly dark, or as dark as earlier releases. Or maybe, I've heard too much dark music to rate this of the same feeling anymore.

No comments:

Post a Comment