“Metal is over. Sunn O))) wins.”
You can find out why for yourself. Simultaneously the strangest and the most accessible entry in Sunn O)))’s catalog, their new album Monoliths & Dimensions raises the technical bar for drone metal to a level unlikely to be topped. It has the things you might expect from this band — it is geologically slow, it is frighteningly heavy, it conveys distance and age and size and power. Not surprisingly, it features the unearthly throat-sounds of Attila Csihar, a frequent Sunn O))) collaborator, and the para-guitar wizardry of Oren Ambarchi, who also worked on Black One. Surprisingly, it also has a women’s choir imitating a mellotron, a trombone section (in hindsight, it seems unbelievable to me that no other drone group has picked up on the possibilities of low brass, and the slidiness of trombone in particular), and a rotating chamber group of flautists, trumpeters, keyboardists, and electronic sound manipulators.
For the uninitiated: get initiated! Sunn O))) is nothing like the metal groups you’re thinking of. No drums, no guitar heroism, no funny hair. Theirs is the heaviness of steel vault doors and glacial erosion, not small-arms fire and furious screeching. They have more in common with the minimalist experiments of Einstürzende Neubauten than they do with the operatic exercises of, say, Iron Maiden (not that there’s anything wrong with operatic exercises).
At any rate, this is Sunn O)))’s most accomplished work to date, the avant garde, the bleeding-edge state of the art in extreme metal, and the best album so far of 2009.