Bassist-vocalist Al Cisneros and drummer Chris Hakius, once two-thirds of the mighty Sleep and now both halves of the duo OM, named their latest album, Conference of the Birds (Holy Mountain), after a 13th-century Persian Sufi epic whose title is more often translated as “The Parliament of the Birds.” To my ears “conference” has a sort of fluorescent-lit office-bound quality to it, but there’s nothing else mundane about the album: Cisneros and Hakius may not have the maniac energy of Sleep guitarist Matt Pike, who now fronts High on Fire, but their long-haul focus produces its own kind of catharsis. Om’s 2005 debut, Variations on a Theme, was three sprawling tracks of cyclical, hypnotizing grind, tight but sludgy, with Cisneros delivering his philosophical-psychedelic lyrics with the same chilling, tranced-out affectlessness Ozzy Osbourne managed at his most doped-up and visionary. The two tracks on Conference of the Birds, each more than 15 minutes long, build on this pretty damn fundamental fundament by stretching toward a firmament. Both words and music seem to be trying to paint an outer landscape, not just an inner one–a battle in the desert, an imam calling from a mountain, an opium den on Planet Heavy–and the whole thing’s more open, fluid, and expansive. –Monica Kendrick
