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| And you thought prog was pretentious? Check this out: Sunn O))) seems to take themselves more seriously than even the most humorless symph band, from their doom-and-gloom music to their album art to their very name. And hell, partly because they are so consistent in their vision, it works. Sunn O)))'s music plays out at a glacial pace, layers of guitar and bass feedback that would be crushingly heavy if they weren't so stretched out in time. This is heavy metal music played by humans with tremendously decelerated metabolisms, humans whose lifespans play out over centuries rather than decades. Indeed, it's so slow as to be almost placid, if it didn't sound so downright evil at times. The sounds that O'Malley and Anderson squeeze out of their instruments - mostly just guitar and bass - worm their way through your psyche and into your nightmares. In "My Wall," wave upon wave of feedback, much of it settled way down in the low end, so low as to seemingly shake the very stars (the band calls it "blackened sub-bass"), punish the listener slowly, like a river wearing away at its rock prison. A programmed drum beat and some actual (sub-bass) riffing add a welcome respite from the amorphous noise in "The Gates of Ballard", but "A Shaving of the Horn That Speared You" throws musical convention entirely to the wind in favor of eerie bumps and scrapes in the night. The latter is a bit too abstract for me; I am reminded of the frequent criticism of Univers Zero's Heresie: the band makes a bit too much of a musical sacrifice in favor of evoking an evil atmosphere, and they lose my attention halfway through. But the first two tracks are breathtaking. When stars are dying and the universe is collapsing in on itself over the course of billions of years, White1 is the music that will be playing on the gods' stereos. review by Brandon Wu — 12-1-04 —
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