Sunn O))) have always tested the limits of the listener's endurance. Even if you're the sort of person who listens to Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music recreationally, and I have been guilty of that, a Sunn O))) record can test your patience like almost nothing else. There is no payoff waiting at the end. The reward is in the journey.
Life Metal is another exercise in textural abstraction and tangible vibration, thick waves of sound washing over you until distortion and feedback become almost physical. Calling it doom metal is convenient, but doesn't really explain what's happening. These aren't songs in any conventional sense. They're slowly shifting masses of sound, built from frequencies, harmonics and volume, and designed to be felt as much as heard.
Recorded by Steve Albini at Electrical Audio, Life Metal sounds enormous. His characteristically natural production is particularly well suited to Sunn O))). For music this dense, there's an extraordinary amount of space in the recording. The amplifiers breathe. Individual tones emerge from the distortion, hang in the air and disappear again. At sufficient volume, the whole thing starts to feel less like listening to a record than standing inside it.
Opening track "Between Sleipnir's Breaths" introduces Hildur Guðnadóttir's eerie incantations over a long, droning backdrop. The guitars move at geological speed while voices and other textures appear somewhere inside the mass. It's a psychotronic experience where you can almost taste the sound of metal.
"Troubled Air" changes the atmosphere considerably. Unusual harmonies and chiming percussion introduce something approaching light into all that darkness. Sunn O))) haven't suddenly become easy listening, but the piece demonstrates how much variation Stephen O'Malley and Greg Anderson can create while apparently doing very little. Tiny changes in harmony or texture become significant when everything around them moves this slowly.
"Aurora" is less convincing. By Sunn O))) standards, it feels almost generic, revisiting sounds and ideas they've explored more effectively elsewhere. On an album approaching seventy minutes, that's a problem. This music demands complete attention, and "Aurora" is the point where concentration begins to wander.
Then comes "Novae."
The twenty-five-minute closer is one of the best pieces in Sunn O)))'s catalogue. It contains much of what makes the band fascinating in a single enormous atmospheric suite. At times it is almost ethereal, with tones hovering rather than moving. Then the amplifiers seem to swallow everything and it becomes crushingly cacophonous again. There is no conventional climax because Sunn O))) don't really operate that way. The music expands, contracts and changes density until your perception of time starts to change with it.
That's both the attraction and the difficulty of Life Metal. Sunn O))) require undivided attention, yet they deliberately deny the listener most of the things music normally uses to hold that attention. There are no choruses coming. No riffs designed to resolve themselves neatly. No drum beat to carry you forward. You either enter the sound or spend seventy minutes waiting for something to happen.
Dropping "Aurora" might have made Life Metal a slightly leaner and more effective record, but "lean" is probably a ridiculous word to apply to Sunn O))) in the first place. Excess, duration and repetition are fundamental to what they do.
Despite the title, and despite all the dirty, grimy doom contained within these grooves, Life Metal ultimately has less in common with conventional metal than with experimental music, drone and sound installation. It isn't trying to entertain in the usual sense. It's trying to alter the room, the air in it and, for an hour or so, the person sitting inside. It's music as a physical object. It's art.
Genre: Drone Metal
Release Date: April 26th, 2019
Label: Southern Lord
Rating: 6/10
