Earth
The Bees Made Honey In The Lion's Skull

The search for the stripping of sound continues.

Dylan Carson's Earth (remember: the man who transformed, for better or worse, Kurt Cobain from rockstar to legend), along with his wife Adrienne Davies, bassist Don McGreevy, and keyboardist Steve Moore present with the new "The Bees Made Honey In The Lion's Skull" a further continuation in the path opened by "Pentastar: In the Style of Demons" (perhaps my favorite Earth album) and carved out with "Hex: or Imprinting the Infernal Method" (and through the re-reading of "Hibernaculum"): exhausting descriptive songs based on rarefied, very intense guitar riffs and slow, hypnotic drumming.

This is an album heavily indebted to psychedelia (an organetto Hammond is often present), but with elements attributable to North American musical tradition from jazz (exemplified by the presence on three tracks of Bill Frisell's twang guitar) to country/gospel, an album that communicates and suggests "western" sensations (not coincidentally, Carson cites J. Jarmusch's film "Dead Man" as an inspiration) and that decidedly distances itself from DroneMetal excesses (for those, ask Sunn O))), please). From the fearsome beginnings of "Extra-capsular extraction/Earth2/Phase3" of lamonteyoughian derivation, they move even closer to a personal song-form based on the dilation of sounds, their essentiality, and perfection; in some moments, they strongly evoke a post-Morriconian imagery through a sort of 21st-century folkmusic (the track "Rise To Glory"), in others oriental (or middle-eastern) suggestions that estrange the listener even with the help of a piano backdrop ("Hung from the Moon").

Alongside the enthusiasms, one cannot help but notice that here and there a certain boredom peeks through due to an excessive redundancy and excessive baroqueness, sensations which are nonetheless very subjective and mood-dependent.
Earth presents themselves to the public, therefore, with an album that perhaps represents their masterpiece, monotonous (not to be understood as a flaw), magniloquent and lined with hypnotic suggestions: as if in the years of maturity (and after detoxifying), Carson had sedated the dronedemon under a Folk blanket of expressive perfection and meticulous attention to detail.