Hex - Earth

US band Earth's album 'Hex: Or printing in the Infernal Method' combines doom/drone with country and western music to create a desolate image of an American West long dead. 'Hex' is a lethargic and sprawling album of long, drawn out riffs and feedback-ambience which evokes endless desolate plains and windswept mountains, like the soundtrack to the bleakest Western never made. Consisting of simple, crawling drum beats accompanied by single or dual electric guitars and at times an additional subtle banjo, a series of slow and disheartened chords are played out in a manner suggestive of a lone traveller riding across a vast barren landscape on a tired mount. ...  Read the complete review

Earth is a highly influential doom rock band from Washington, and whatever they sounded like prior to their fourth album, 'HEX: Or Printing in the Infernal Method' inaugurates a new era of highly distinctive, near-ambient drone music that's sure to divide doom fans. These monumentally slow compositions evoke a nostalgic, desolate sense of the Old West, borrowing the guitar style from Ennio Morricone's seminal Spaghetti Western soundtracks and taking the already-glacial tempo of doom metal to new extremes. An entirely instrumental and minimalistic album, this comes perilously close to country music on several occasions by incorporating the style effectively, as ...  Read the complete review