If your interest in Sunn O))) stems primarily from the band's patient employment of tone and time as channeled through electric bass, electric guitar, and stacks of amplifiers, you might hate "Alice", the brilliant closing track of its seventh and arguably best album, Monoliths & Dimensions. Sure, these 17 minutes are loud and torpid, easing from one note to another, distortion dripping from each new intonation. But "Alice" finds Sunn O))) exploiting a newfound spaciousness and elegance. As its founders, Greg Anderson and Stephen O'Malley, crawl across a loose blues progression that mirrors those of slow metal fountainhead Earth, a swell of French and English horns, violin and viola, harp and light percussion rises. Surrounding the guitars, they're like the perfect summer haze, refracting and softening the season's relentless sunlight. "Alice" ends with a fanfare of sorts for this small orchestra. Its long tones are light and lifting, a little like Stars of the Lid commissioning Igor Stravinsky. More Fluorescent One than Black Two, it's completely unexpected, mesmerizing, and beautiful.
Well, not completely unexpected: Like the rest of Monoliths & Dimensions, "Alice" offers a culmination of most everything Sunn O))) have done right during their decade of volume-based plunder. Anderson and O'Malley have long rendered rock riffs with painstaking deliberation, consistently adding the ideas of elite collaborators and occasional no-explanation experiments. The Grimm Robe Demos took to early Earth, while Black One ground an Immortal black metal burst into one 10-minute tectonic motion. Merzbow, Xasthur's Malefic, Thrones' Joe Preston, and Mayhem's Attila Csihar stood among high-ranking contributors. Pieces like "bassALIENS" (23 minutes of electric bass tone exploration) and "My Wall" (25 minutes of Julian Cope verbiage battered by cascades of amplifier hum) ensured that Sunn O))) was doing more than swapping chords for feedback.
Monoliths & Dimensions takes the idea even further, gathering collaborators-- from Csihar and Earth's Dylan Carlson to Australian drone master Oren Ambarchi and vocalist Jessika Kenney, who sang so well on Wolves in the Throne Room's Two Hunters-- for four tracks that push Sunn O))) in directions unforeseen: Riffs come wrapped in strings. Conch shells share space with upright bass fleets. Both an operatic female choir and Portland noise nut Daniel Menche sing opposite the Mayhem frontman. All told, as on 2007's revelatory Black One, Monoliths & Dimensions indicates that Sunn O))) and the possibilities of its slow music stretch beyond what we imagined.
About three-dozen people contribute to Monoliths' four cuts. Two of these tracks exceed 16 minutes, while their counterparts either approach or encroach on the 10-minute mark. It might seem that only size matters for Sunn O))) here, but that's just the surface. None of these pieces are big for bigness' sake. Rather, they all bear intricacies that erode them from within. A given piece's size becomes its fatal flaw. The strings and synthesizers ascend through the gaps in the sluggish riffs of "Alice", for instance, composer Eyvind Kang arranging the parts to crack and cover their host. By track's end, the guitars are gone, ruins eviscerated by a new growth of ivy.
Then there's "Big Church". The female choir led by Kinney, a four-guitar army including Ambarchi and Carlson, and the manipulated Middle Earth incantations of Csihar clash during three three-minute sections. The guitars or the voices invoke each third, and their parts slip by one another like the pieces of an amoeboid jigsaw puzzle. Csihar always overruns them, though, pushing each section into a chaotic climax. On "Hunting and Gathering (Cydonia)", Csihar cloaks some of the album's most literal lyrics-- "They take the world and the earth, breathing fire on the endless oil seas"-- in his native Hungarian, but the music makes the message clear. Each time Csihar finishes a set of imprecations, a triumph of vocals and horns rises and exalts while the electric riff subsides. This is a new battle hymn.
And there's the album's other giant, opener "Aghartha". As close as Monoliths gets to the classic drone of Sunn O)))'s past, O'Malley and Anderson paw at chords on perfectly engineered electric bass and guitar. Again, a de facto chamber ensemble joins, as a droning Tibetan horn (the two-player Dung Chen) displaces the air beneath the guitars and sharp piano chords splinter whatever they encounter. These sounds sublimate into one drone, forcing the guitars out of the frame before fading into silence themselves. Only the sound of rushing water washes beneath Csihar's daunting voice, as he speaks of "a tunnel [that] gouges in the shapes of the stream in the great abyss of the sky" in booming, broken English. He's looking for new sparks to destroy the old order, for fresh energy to upset the established form. And that's exactly what Monoliths & Dimensions does: It takes one of the world's most lauded loud bands and rearranges its game with an inspiring cycle of risk and reward.
Perhaps Black One came with a caveat emptor or two. You'd better like your music dark and relentless, and contextual understandings of Sunn O))) and black metal and drone helped. Lacking those things, perhaps you suspended your disbelief enough to appreciate Malfeic's scorched voice or, unfortunately, dismissed it outright as two self-serious dudes and their fucked-up friends dicking around with darkness. Incorrect, I think, but understandable. Monoliths & Dimensions requires no such warnings. Per Sunn O)))'s long-standing dogma, "Maximum volume [still] yields maximum results." But this time, there's enough musical range and temperance to usher even the most resolute naysayer into this intricate wonderland.
