No matter what phase of Earth you’re considering, be it the enormous and electrostatic drones of the band’s earliest and heaviest days or the swaddled blues elegance of their post-millennial reboot, there’s one simple and unifying link: Dylan Carlson is a paragon of guitar control. On Earth 2, he wielded his instrument and amplifiers with a powerful precision, creating sounds that weren’t only big but also topographically rich; you could study the curves and crags of his sound as if you were reading a three-dimensional map of the Cascade Range. When Carlson rebuilt Earth as an instrumental rock band a decade ago, he used his guitar to cut a filigree of exquisite riffs through the bedrock of Adrienne Davies’ patient drumming. Hearing him play during The Bees Made Honey in the Lion’s Skull suggested a woodworker cutting soft, delicate shapes into an enormous oaken block. Whether working on the monolithic scale of Earth’s origins or through the microcosmic scope of its rejuvenation, Carlson has always handled his duties like a master puppeteer with supreme, expressive sway.
The most telling moment, then, of Earth’s latest LP arrives with “Even Hell Has Its Heroes”, an instrumental that finds Carlson fighting against Earth’s need for stricture and structure with bona fide guitar solos. Above a bed of dense, multi-tracked guitars, he even trades licks with Built to Spill's Brett Netson. The song begins as archetypal latter-day Earth, the notes pneumatically bolted to the beat. Carlson’s tone, however, is a bit more pointed than usual, and he and Netson soon unspool the song’s theme into spirals of variations, taking liberties with their leads rather than submitting to Earth's usual economy. Supported by Netson and producer Randall Dunn, Carlson is free to step out near the seven-minute mark; you can almost picture him with his eyes closed and jaw titled skyward, fingers feeling the strings and flying across them rather than calculating where and when the melody must land. It’s one of the most electrifying moments in Earth’s inconsistent quarter-century history, a genuine rock ’n’ roll climax for a band that’s mostly marched slowly, steadily into the middle distance.
Those licks speak to a restlessness that defines Primitive and Deadly, the first Earth album to feature vocalists since Carlson sang a little in the mid-’90s and since Kurt Cobain and Kelly Canary signed on for the group’s earliest work. Former Screaming Trees frontman Mark Lanegan slips inside two tracks, sending up his dark-eyed observations about destructive dawns and grim landscapes with his static, speak-sing clip. Despite Lanegan’s stentorian voice, he gets lost inside Earth’s latticework, his voice often feeling more like a footnote than a new feature. “Children, children, get ready/ You better get ready/ It’s new revelation time,” he musters during “The Serpent is Coming”, trying to twist some soulful cadence into his stiff proclamations but coming across like a revival preacher being overrun by his congregation. During “Rooks Across the Gate”, he reads the text of some macabre fever dream, the Carlson-penned lyrics suggesting the murder ballads he’s encountered in his studies of European folk. Despite the scare of the material, though, Lanegan undersells the images. It’s possible to ignore his echo-enhanced voice altogether, to overlook it in favor of the sharp rhythmic interplay between Carlson, Davies, and bassist Bill Herzog. The idea of Earth’s desolate music augmented by harrowing visions solemnly delivered is an intriguing one, but Lanegan’s execution is inchoate and underwhelming. Next time, perhaps Nick Cave, David Tibet and Julian Cope can be on standby?
Where Lanegan missteps by giving Earth a kind of deferential distance, Rose Windows singer Rabia Shaheen Qazi succeeds by using their music as a platform. She commands during “From the Zodiacal Light”, the album’s first single and 11-minute centerpiece. Invoking Ozzy Osbourne and Sandy Denny, she perches above the band to deliver a sermon of fear and salvation. Bewitching and intimate, she represents the vocal fulfillment of the balance between black, white, and gray that Earth has pursued with guitars, drums, and bass for the last decade. The band moves perfectly with her and the words. During the song’s more fraught moments, the trio tenses into moments of feedback and pause; late in the track, when Qazi lingers between the future and failure, the band slinks into a similarly indecisive circle. This is doom metal, delivered with the very grace and meticulous design that’s characterized Earth’s second life.
Earth has now existed for longer and made more records as a set of subtle, almost-quiet instrumentalists than as the jolting, pioneering volume lords that first earned Carlson a reputation. And though the albums made between 2005’s Hex; Or Printing in the Infernal Method and the two-volume Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light set offered variation with a rotation of keyboards, basses and cellos, they all mined a similar aesthetic. Primitive and Deadly even begins by recapitulating every phase of the band’s career, as opener “Torn by the Fox of the Crescent Moon” attaches the finesse of latter-day Earth to a touch of downtrodden, heavy doom. But Earth have seemed overdue for a change, and these songs collectively represent a promising half-step toward it. This is the closest Carlson has ever been to leading a rock band, to fully offloading his exceptional sense of control into a systemic and thorough whole. This isn’t quite, as Lanegan suggests, “a new revelation,” but sure, children, go ahead and get ready: This might be the beginning of a new Earth.
