Written by Baazgor

You have a warranty for your speakers, right?

Imagine a crowded area. You see a gentleman behind several rows of people with a look on his face resembling weather-beaten cut stone, staring blankly into nothing. You see him blink once, and he reaches into his jacket. In the blink of an eye, he detonates an explosive strapped to his chest. Your central nervous system recedes into a state of primitive shock and begins to stutter. The explosion rips through the crowd. Limbs are forcefully orphaned, skin and body tissue rend and scorch, your ears ring, everything begins to move in slow motion, victims stagger about with their clothes torn up, bodies littered the street like garbage and you desperately begin counting the seconds to when you might wake up from this nightmare.

‘Monoliths and Dimensions’ is that portion of time in which your mind attempts to translate the carnage, spread out over a span of fifty three minutes. Passages of crushingly slow drone, anthropomorphic and primal feedback attached like parasites to layers of sound so thick that its own gravity turns it into some fucked up black hole that eats every animate object that comes anywhere remotely near it. What the core members of Sunn, Greg Anderson and Stephen O’Malley, have created surpasses the concept of abstract and experimental music and moves it into an ethereal fog where most musical acts would never attempt to explore. ‘Monoliths and Dimensions’ is far ahead of its time, its invoking, powerful, epic and monumentally sinister. Even with five months left in the year, I’m more than confident in saying that this album will appear on my ‘Best of 2009’ list.

Anderson and O’Malley, alongside of session vocalist Attila Csihar (Mayhem/Tormentor), ritualize their music alongside a legion of other musicians armed from bottom to top with a cache of instruments, coming together like an army to create a diseased body of music. We’re talking upright basses, violin, viola, piano, conch shells, English and French horns, organs, moogs, trumpets, trombones, harps, clarinets, flutes, tubular bells and both female and male choirs. This isn’t some orchestra or some bullshit backroom jazz ensemble. You might scoff at some of these objects, I mean, what could be so threatening about a trumpet or a piano? Ignorance. What could be so threatening about a thirty five cent ink pen. Nothing, right? Until it’s been jabbed into the side of somebody’s neck.

The album opens with ‘Aghartha’, hovering near eighteen minutes in length. Listeners are ushered into hell with thundering and insanely down-tuned guitars which ring out abstract progressions for the first quarter of the song as a layer of untraceable noise slowly starts to rise up from behind. Csihar enters around the six minute mark, and quite frankly, I can’t really think of anybody better suited for this particular performance. His nearly-spoken, soft vocals are enriched with his thick accent and his voice begins to help shape this semi-formless mass into a sphere of malignancy, giving it direction and lighting it almost like a beacon. The deep bass notes of a piano harmonize the notes of the guitars, which at this point have calm downed and have become lighter and more controlled. Towards the nine minute mark is where the listener is greeted with the disorderly screech of the strings, which feel like nails being scratched so hard on a chalkboard you expect to hear the sound of fingernails behind snapped backwards out of the skin. More noise emerges, and ‘Aghartha’s peak begins to form. Some of the things going on in the background are things I simply can’t describe because I have no idea what the hell they are. From that point, it flares up one more time with the presence of a droning brass, and at this point, there are no more guitars. I can only describe the drone of the brass, as it comes closer and closer in the mix of the audio, to be that of a cloud of flies the size of a small city, buzzing in cacophony. Throughout all of this, Csihar guides the listeners through a labyrinth of words and ideas before it ends with his voice being the one of the two sole remainders of this song.

The second track, ‘Big Church’…remarkable. My words here are useless. I can describe everything I want and it would be a mere dictated insult towards the true power of this song. The incredible power of the female choir is astounding to a point where I just laugh when I listen to it. It’s trade off with the male choir, which immediately comes up right underneath the female choir at about two minutes in, creates a collision of noise and when these two huge layers of centralized melodies briefly meet in the faint light of a controlled dissonance creates a tone that made me squint my eyes, as if they had rapidly dialated. Music isn’t supposed to do this, music isn’t supposed to be this invasive. Much like ‘Aghartha’, parasitic layers of noise march around this core musical directive to create something beyond the scope of evil. Again, the vocal work here is stunning and when it merges together with the severely down-tuned guitars, it creates this epic surge of raw power.

‘Hunting and Gathering’, features a more structured, rhythm based lead along side of Csihar’s final and most dynamic vocal performance on the album. The track radiates a more regal flair that is less menacing than the previous two, but still retains the mentally incapacitating properties of the earlier cuts. Brass instruments fire like artillery flanked by deep surges of male choir vocals. The final track on ‘Monoliths and Dimensions’ is ‘Alice’, an instrumental track that is slightly over sixteen minutes in length. Much unlike it’s predecessors, it is like the mocking calm after a terrible storm, bringing up the sun to break the clouds and light up the wastes left by that which just passed. Again, the brass is present, along side of deep, clear bass tones and shimmering, slightly-distorted guitars. At about one third of the way through, the deep down-tuned electric guitar makes one last, long appearance before ending on a rather surprisingly, uplifting note as the trumpet, accompanied by the crystalline twinkling of a harp ends ‘Monoliths and Dimensions’ on a completely different note from where it started.

I’ll be the first person to say that I never liked this band. I never enjoyed or appreciated anything in regards to Dark Ambient, Experimental Noise or Drone save for a few select groups. I’m not converting to a Sunn O))) fanboy, nor will I rush to pursue future release or dig around for old ones. I will say this: ‘Monoliths and Dimensions’ is epic, absurd and grand from start to finish. Why I decided to even listen to this is something I can’t figure out, but I’m certainly very, very glad I did. That being said, I was never a fan of this type of music. I simply state this for the sole reason that this just might be something you’ll find just as harrowing and as fascinating as I did, regardless of your particular preferences in music.

Final Score: 9/10

--Written by Baazgor (Andrew Krause) for Metaltome.com, August 2nd, 2009.

Written by :

Andrew Krause

 

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