Hibernaculum - Earth

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. Country twangs ...

Hex - Earth

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 heard when 'An ...

The Bees Made Honey In The Lions Skull - Earth

Earth continue to play their Western-tinged drone doom rock on this year's release, but the style has subtly changed since the days of 'HEX' to favour a more bluesy and, overall, more optimistic approach. The songs are still extended, minimal, repetitive compositions based around seriously sloooooow guitar melodies, but the atmosphere is less depressing and much more uplifting this time round, with only a couple of exceptions in the form of later songs such as 'Omens and Portents II: Carrion Crow' that return to the old, darker style. The piano comes to the fore in 'Engine of Ruin' to add some variety, but this is still essentially an album geared towards hypnotic repetition of ...