Sunn O)))
Flight Of The Behemoth

I had been waiting for a reissue with an accompanying vinyl remastering of the album in question for a long time, since the aforementioned are one of my favorite bands of recent times (yes, you heard that right, favorite band).

It is pointless to start by saying who Greg Anderson and Stephen O'Malley are and what they do in this now more than twenty-year-old project, already knowing that they take their name from a brand of amplifiers and play a sort of exhausting Drone metal, which gradually has self-contaminated with various experiments from more or less distant fields: see sacred music and free jazz in the masterpiece Monoliths & Dimensions, black Metal in Black One, dark Ambient in the two White albums, and indeed, harsh noise and noise experimentation in this one reviewed here.

Flight of the Behemoth is dated, now bearing 18 years on its shoulders, but attests more than any other album, what the two hooded rogues had in mind, already back then, to make their mother project tangible and enduring: to experiment with new solutions by calling in guests from time to time who satisfied and completed the general mood required by the album.

Thanks to this trick, the two have managed to dynamically carry forward the word in a genre that has very little dynamic (and does it seem little to you?).

In this third chapter, if you count Grimmrobe Demos as an album, they draw on the strength of the guru of noise electronics, Masami Akita, aka Merzbow, an evil genius who with his musical (musical?) digressions hammers and pierces the eardrums of the listener: after the standard 20 minutes, infernally and purely drone, of the first two tracks, fused into one another, creating a malevolent suite, in perpetual stasis, black as a stormy sea that absorbs and engulfs everything, the two O))) Bow arrive to raise the harsh flag over all of us: distorted and detuned pianos, penetrating and almost industrial noises, piercing and intimidating dynamism, exaggerated volumes and bleeding ears, dark, unreal and hyper-distorted atmosphere. These are the two marches that see Masami rise to the occasion and make whatever he wants of our guitars.

In closing comes a cover of Metallica, which here, obviously slows down, stretches, darkens, presenting the only vocal grunt of the album and also the only hint of rhythm (albeit submerged by our guitar drones) in the entire album.

An excellent closing for an album perhaps not perfect, but which in its imperfection knows how to fascinate and knows how to project a light (yes, light, sure) on what the two hooded monks would do shortly thereafter with their subsequent works.

Gorgeous obviously the vinyl version, with a remastering that makes the sound more enveloping and less angular: double glow in the dark vinyl in a limited edition with an included poster and killer packaging.