Earth shattering performance

Continuing my recent binge of church-based gigs, last Sunday I had a beautiful foray to The Union Chapel to see Earth’s tour, supported by Mount Eerie and the pretty obscure French Canadian Ô Paon. If you read my recent review of Nicolas Jaar at Roundhouse, you’ll be well aware that sweaty, active gigs are not really my thing. As such, spending several hours sitting in a cold church listening to some sweet ‘ATP’-presented music is pretty much ideal. Sadly this review will likely lack in humour as all the patrons were not absolute mugs, so remained quiet and respectful throughout, as it always should be.

Ô Paon opened the show, which she informed us was her biggest ever. Her sound is somewhat hard to describe but she reminded me of a more singer-songwriter style grouper; intricately layered structures of delicate guitar and vocals built up through extensive looping. Her singing also made me think in places of Braids’ Raphaelle Standell-Preston, with long notes extremely full and a playful vocal style. Numerous tricks were employed to coax the full range of timbres from her voice and guitar; she would turn her head mid-note to produce a Doppler effect, alongside not-so standard guitar practice such as scraping her pick along the ridges of the strings. All of the lyrics were sung in French but this was in no way to her detriment; it allowed you to focus more on the melodies and layers she was creating. Besides, I’m sure whatever her lyrics were they were pretty great.

I was pretty excited for Mount Eerie’s slot, mostly because I was hopeful he would play some of his fantastic 2009 black metal inspired folk album Wind’s Poem. Upon opening he immediately dashed my hopes, coming out with a 12-string guitar and informing us “This is all new material tonight”. Obviously he stuck to his word and we were treated to a set entirely consistent of tracks I had never heard before. I can’t help but feel I ruined Eerie’s set for myself by not paying attention; I’d assure myself that I would focus on his deep lyricism (perhaps his strongest trait), but instead ended up daydreaming every track. He managed to get some interesting sounds out of his guitar, and I did particularly enjoy ‘House Shapes’, a track which opened with 4 – 5 second blasts of atonal strumming, each separated by piercing silence. All of the new material was in a far more standard Eerie/The Microphones style, with the two releases penned for May and September.

The man who invented drone metal, Dylan Carson, revealed no shocks with his band Earth, now known for their “country doom” – still slow, drawn out instrumental tracks, but far less heavy than his massively influential material (so influential that Sunn O))) named a track after him). Earth played mostly from their newest album Angels of darkness, Demons of Light II. In this incarnation, Carson is accompanied by a bassist, drummer and cellist. It was particularly interesting to hear some old tracks (though nothing_ Earth 2 _era) such as ‘Tallahassee’ performed with the cello; for this track the cello was put through a pedal that gave it an extremely deep, doomy sound.

The (pre-encore) set was ended with ‘The Bees Made Honey in the Lion’s Skull’, probably the highlight of the evening. Each member of the band is extremely tight in their playing, and everything is controlled perfectly – in this track, extensive use was made not only of guitar feedback, but also cello. This feedback was never the kind of raw idiocy you would hear morons like Kasabian (if they even use feedback, I haven’t listened to them – just blindly assuming) idiotically bashing out, it was carefully handled, subtle, and surprisingly quiet. The cello’s feedback provided deep, resonant bass, only noticeable if you listened really carefully. These short bursts of feedback were always followed by a drop straight back into the grooves Earth manage to develop in their generally 10 minute upwards tracks. While it’s obviously not what you would expect had you only heard the drone metal albums, Dylan Carson is still a musical force to be reckoned with and I highly recommend that if you can, you try and catch this tour at some point.