Sunn O))) albums have tended to be summits where the luminaries of noise and volume gather for electric communion. Almost as soon as the duo of Greg Anderson and Stephen O’Malley moved beyond the simple amplifier worship of their early days, they began recruiting peers to help build audacious records, as high on concepts as they were on decibels.
Noise paragon Merzbow added to the early bedlam, while misfit rock demigod Julian Cope read a poem that inserted Sunn O))) into a continuum of pan-cultural myths to begin their awesome if inchoate White volumes in 2003. Anderson and O’Malley infamously locked Xasthur’s Malefic in a coffin for their breakthrough LP, Black One, and recruited a few of their own idols for 2009’s elegantly textured Monoliths & Dimensions. They’ve made records with Boris, Scott Walker, and Ulver and employed black metal icon Attila Csihar of Mayhem as their lead speaker and performance artist in residence for a decade. Sunn O)))’s liner notes scan like the weirdo metal equivalent of some fantasy sports roster.
Sometimes, though, all those guests have clouded out the essence of Sunn O))). Anderson and O’Malley share a rare chemistry; they are able to work through extended riffs at famously testudinal paces and high volumes with absolute control. But Life Metal—the first of two Sunn O))) albums planned for 2019—rectifies the oversight. On four tracks that invoke metaphors about landscapes carved by geologic deep time and references to the music of the spheres, Anderson and O’Malley foreground their seismic relationship and their shared ability to make 12 or 25-minute spans of slow-motion drone feel like a historic religious ritual.
To be clear, Anderson and O’Malley are not alone here. Life Metal’s easiest sales pitch is the presence of producer Steve Albini, whose ability to make very loud records is fabled. In this partnership that’s as obvious as it is overdue, Albini captures the pair with perfect detail, so that you can practically feel their fingers crawling down their guitars’ necks at the end of “Aurora.” Silkworm’s Tim Midyett galvanizes the drones with his aluminum-neck bass, and longtime contributor T.O.S. Nieuwenhuizen again adds electronics. There is a trace of pipe organ, luminous and ominous, from minimalist composer Anthony Pateras beneath “Troubled Air,” too.Perhaps most striking is Icelandic cellist and composer Hildur Guðnadóttir, who hesitantly sings verses borrowed from ancient Aztec poets during the colossal opener “Between Sleipnir’s Breaths,” her voice chipped into the drone like a petroglyph on a canyon wall. She also provides a steady cello hum on the colossal 25-minute closer, “Novae.”
But these are all Easter eggs that you’ll find in later listens. Again and again, what’s immediately striking about Life Metal is Anderson and O’Malley’s astonishing grace and dexterity with such heavy decibel loads. “Aurora” employs a classic Sunn O))) stratagem: cycling through the steps of a riff and webbing together the spaces between notes with rays of decay and feedback. Each note lands as another stomp to the chest, each roaring gap between them like an attempt to massage away the pain. For all the talk about Sunn O)))’s subterranean tones, the guitars here seem to sparkle with overtones and harmony. It’s the sensation of stumbling through a cavernous room in search of a light switch and instead finding a glowing James Turrell installation tucked in a corner. At its best, Life Metal can be breathtaking by surprise, with stunning moments nested inside expected settings.
One of the many running jokes about Sunn O)) is that anyone with the right gear and enough patience can make this music, slowly droning on in gradually shifting lockstep. And sure, in the late 1990s, when Sunn O))) was a bit of an excuse to get high and play low, maybe that was true. But O’Malley has spent the last several years playing and premiering the delicate music of composer Alvin Lucier, where tiny differences in pitch and time create hypnotic pulses so faint you doubt they’re there. Sunn O))) have rarely sounded as delicate as the later spans of “Novae,” their guitars wrapping around Guðnadóttir’s cello with the patience of a boa constrictor. It is a testament to O’Malley’s expanding music résumé.
Sunn O))) excel at sloganeering to the point of propaganda, using their particular obsession with volume as a sharp branding tool. Their maxim, for instance, has long been “Maximum volume yields maximum results,” while assorted T-shirts ask “Ever breathe a frequency?” or remind us to “Praise Iommi.” But Life Metal underlines the point of it all: These four pieces are best suited to take over a room, to fill a venue as massive as the sound itself and, in turn, to be felt. They vibrate, pulse, and quiver. In a time where we experience so much media on a seemingly microscopic scale, from earbuds to smartphone screens, Life Metal takes up a large space, where devastating waves of sound that make actual ceilings crumble somehow become a restorative listening experience. Depending on what you need, Life Metal is, at maximum volume, a shield or a cape, a timely exercise in either retreating from the outside world or squaring up to it without blinking.
