EARTH 2 - SPECIAL LOW FREQUENCY VERSION

The appeal of an album such as "Special Low Frequency Version" is difficult to rationalize to oneself, much less explain to another person, so this review is going to be very brief.

This album is mostly Dylan Carson repeating a few riffs tuned to the lowest possible frequency imaginable; however, this description does not truly do justice to the actual listening experience.

Imagine, for a moment, that it's the end of the world. You hide in your bomb shelter and you cover your ears and close your eyes as the earth shakes itself apart. When you emerge, you find something curious: While the buildings around you have fallen down and the streets are littered with corpses, you notice that the sun is still hanging in the sky and that it is still a bright, sunny day. And you notice a flower blooming from the wreckage of the post office, and think to yourself, "Perhaps this is a form of beauty". And if one of the last of the towering skyscrapers deigns to crumple atop you, you may think to yourself, "Perhaps this, too, is beautiful."

And that's "Earth 2: Special Low Frequency Version". Listen to it for yourself and see if I'm not wrong.

Ground zero for the drone variant of doom metal, Earth 2 is a seminal fusion of the doomiest end of metal with a grungy sort of ambient music, to create a musical soundscape in which guitar riffs last forever and extend off into the horizon, going to who knows where. Like the best ambient albums, it's equally good as music to listen to with your full attention and as a background piece which fades into and out of your consciousness. Not for everyone, and certainly after I'm done listening to it I find I'm in the mood for something faster, but anyone with even a mild interest in drone metal will want this one.

One of the benefits of grunge toppling the ever stagnating dominance of the glam pop metal scene was that formerly totally underground strains of music suddenly found an audience. Heavily influenced by The Melvins, the Olympia, WA based group EARTH released their debut album in 1993 and created some of the very first ambient metal that would pretty much kick off a whole new subgenre called drone metal. EARTH's music totally bucked the trend for metal to be heavier and faster with ever more complex compositions and impossibly fast solos. EARTH took the most extreme opposite approach and created a type of music that metalheads and punk rockers might listen to while they do yoga or soak in a hot tub or just want to chill out without leaving their favorite distorted music far behind.

This is an album that I find intriguing. The distortion is a satisfying way cool fuzz that feels as if the shadow of the underworld has cast itself in the light and and an impending dread that is simultaneously ominous and relaxing lurks about on every repetitiously decelerated musical motif. I find myself liking this on rare occasion but it is certainly a rare listen that demands the right mood. My main complaint is that if you want to endure the entire album it is quite lengthy with a running time of over 73 minutes. Of course, there is no law that dictates you must absolutely listen to the entire album. I find this kind of ambient metal most effective as a backdrop to other activities but it is entertaining in its own right, however as a nascent stage of drone metal I find EARTH 2: SPECIAL LOW FREQUENCY VERSION lacks enough diverse elements to keep me coming back to it on a regular basis. It is influential for sure but when the mood strikes to listen to this type of music I prefer the later albums by Sunn O))) or Boris. Still though, a must for aficionados of cutting edge ideas in the constant diversifying world of metal music. 3.5 rounded up