Earth Empty Bottle, 9/24
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Sylvia Plath was right: very often the pleasure of solitude is cold and planetary. And Earth–the Seattle-based band that basically consists of guitarist Dylan Carlson and whoever he’s working with now–offers some of that same sort of pleasure. Ordinary lusty rock ‘n’ roll usually revs people up with speed–it takes the rhythms of pulse and breath and throttles them up just the right amount. But Carlson and company mercilessly refuse to play at a tempo that’s comfortable for the average human’s body. They bring it way way down, past even Sabbathy ‘lude rock, into an icy zone of dark-matter density–you wonder if this deep, deep sludge is being played by Ents or trolls or some other creature that has a longer life span and a much slower metabolism than we do. They aren’t setting the controls for the heart of the sun like so many psychedelic rock bands–they’re trying to tunnel to the center of the earth, and they don’t care how long it takes to get there. There’s nothing communal here, no reaching out to the audience–just riffing and every so often drumming, slow and inexorable as water eroding stone. There aren’t lyrics or vocals or any other attempt to represent human emotion. The music aims for the transpersonal and ecstatic through physical mortification and self-negation.
This was radical stuff in the early 90s, when Earth started–if it sounds less so now, that’s mostly because, a la the Velvet Underground, everybody who bought Earth’s first record seems to have started a band. (Joe Preston, who was on that first record, the 1991 Sub Pop EP Extra-Capsular Extraction, seems to have been in half of them himself.) But Earth’s first full-length, 1993’s Earth 2, still stands as a sort of limbo bar of heaviness–even now there aren’t too many people who can go lower.
Myself, I was a little disappointed. This new, stripped-down Earth doesn’t often land on your head like Judgment Day. The music’s slinkier and subtler and at times even kind of boring–though Carlson and friends clearly aren’t afraid of coming off that way. After all, they’re not bored–they’re going to their private happy places, and you’re responsible for your own. That’s why I wish the set had been longer: given that I was required to immerse myself in the music, rather than simply wait for it to draw me in, some more time would’ve been useful. As it was, I ended up admiring it from a distance, the way you might watch the moon inch across the sky.
