A Guide to Southern Lord

Many longtime Boris aficionados have accused the Japanese noise merchants of “selling out" on 2008’s Smile, but that’s just silliness. The hooky “Statement,” far and away the closest thing to a conventional pop song on the whole record, still boasts a relentless fuzz-wah solo from resident guitar-goddess Wata, capable of both boring a hole in the side of a battleship and scaring any Vampire Weekend fan away in blind panic. The rest of the record is just as endearingly schizoid, opening with an ear-bleeding seven-and-a-half minute cover of Pyg singer Kenji Sawada’s “Flower Sun Rain,” before venturing into Melvins worship (“Buzz-In”), '80s thrash metal (“Laser Beam”), run-down robot boogie (“My Neighbor Satan”) and warped classic rock balladry (“You Were Holding An Umbrella”), Wata’s guitar consistently scorching anything it touches.

The "pop" breakthrough that brought Boris to the (relative) mainstream. Crushing, hooky and perversely divine.

The cover art may ape Nick Drake, but the closest Japanese metal trio Boris comes to a ballad is the blank space between the songs. A grim, harrowing descent into darkness, Akuma No Uta takes the pitch-black witch rock of early Sabbath and delivers it with an eye-popping fury. But even though the songs are moving at a breakneck pace, they still sound gloriously waterlogged. The guitar tone on "Ibitsu" is so low it threatens to detonate the subwoofer — it's a 900 pound St. Bernard that moves with the velocity of a stock car.

There's a weird kind of "otherness" to the songs. It's not just that the lyrics are in Japanese, or that the 10-minute introduction is little more than a toneless, ethereal drone. There's a kind of heft and weight and urgency to the music that makes Akume sound like an artifact from a whole lost civilization. Paradoxically, it gets more mysterious, more cryptic and more fascinating with each pass.

In the early '90s a guitarist from Seattle named Dylan Carlson who fronted a group with the appropriately tectonic name Earth, made the connection between the doom rumblings of metal bands like Black Sabbath and the avant-garde drones of composer LaMonte Young. Earth's brand of ambient doom became its own genre, and no one has taken it further out than Japan's Boris. 1996's Absolutego is heavy metal that's been fossilized, petrified, frozen. It's 60 minutes of agonizingly slow riffs that toll like church bells, rock music that would need to be about 100 beats per minute faster to even, you know, rock. It's the last word in this sort of thing, which hasn't stopped a legion of bands from trying to top it.

You simply can’t talk about Southern Lord without mentioning Sunn O))) — not only because label founders Greg Anderson and Stephen O’Malley make up this drone-happy duo, but also because Sunn O)))’s adventurous sonic aesthetic pretty much defines what Southern Lord is all about. 2004’s White2 makes an excellent introduction to the duo’s special brand of spacey sludge; as usual, there are no drums or rhythm instruments involved on the album’s three extended tracks, just majestic expanses of distorted guitar, rumbling bass and ambient keyboards — all of which drift slowly and hypnotically towards the center of the universe. It’s hard and it’s heavy, but White2 is a different kind of metal altogether.

Yep, it’s that Earth, the same Dylan Carlson-steered project that was putting the “H” in “Heavy” back when Sub Pop was still the hippest label in the land. But instead of the Melvins-esque sludgefests of yore, Earth’s current rotation inhabits a far more melodic — if still glacially slow — universe. Carlson has been described as the “Morricone of Metal,” and he does indeed possess a masterful knack for creating beautifully atmospheric (not to mention ominous) soundscapes injected with ample doses of guitar twang. Bees Made Honey is Earth's finest effort yet, with alluring tracks like “Omens and Portents II: The Carrion Crow” and “Miami Morning Coming Down” unfolding gloriously with every listen.

The inevitable studio collaboration between the American wizards of low-end drone and the Japanese masters of heavy noise is more than a little like King Kong vs. Godzilla — an epic face-off between two well-loved titans, fated to never quite measure up to the massive expectations generated by their impressive reputations. Still, it’s a pretty mighty piece of work, which beefs up Sunn O)))’s space explorations with lumbering drums and skin-flaying guitar, while bringing out the more meditative side of Boris. Altar’s only real wild card is “The Sinking Belle (Blue Sheep),” a creepy lullaby with reverb-drenched piano and half-whispered female vocals, which wouldn’t sound out of place on a David Lynch soundtrack.

After Sleep broke up in the late '90s, guitarist Matt Pike went off to form the justifiably lauded High on Fire while bassist Al Cisneros and drummer Chris Hakius — after a long hiatus — teamed up to create the unjustly overlooked Om, whose blissful name only partially describes their modus operandi. The title track of their third album is essentially ten and a half minutes of Tibetan monk-style chanting, melodically droning bass and insistent tabla rhythms, creating a listening experience that (if you’re in the right head space) can be extremely soothing and spellbinding. And once you’ve been lulled into total submission, the distortion pedals kick in for “Unitive Knowledge of the Godhead,” and the riffs proceed to beat you to a bloody pulp.

Though they’ve often been categorized as “American black metal,” the Olympia, Washington-based Wolves in the Throne Room use that genre in the same way that, say, the Mars Volta use prog-rock — as a launching pad to a more personal musical vision. 2007’s Two Hunters finds the trio adding acoustic folk and Sunn O)))-style ambient influences to their metallic mixture, topping them with the pure and haunting vocal tones of one Jessica Kinney on “Cleansing” and “I Will Lay Down My Bones Among the Rocks and Roots” — the latter of which points to the band’s reported interest in “eco-spiritual” themes. On “Vastness and Sorrow,” their relentless riffage and ice-cold despair equal anything recorded by their Norwegian brethren.

This American black metal supergroup/studio experiment features the talents of Wrest (Lurker of Chalice, Leviathan), Azentrius (Nachtmystium), Lord Imperial (Krieg) and Malefic (Xasthur), many of whom usually work by themselves, and all of whom drove each other to new heights (depths?) of musical darkness during the making of this blistering album. More straightforward than most of the black metal stuff on Southern Lord, Twilight tracks like “As the March of the Worms,” “White Fire Under Black Text” and “Swollen Voices In Silence” are masterpieces of the form, and should fire up the blood of even the most “kvlt”-obsessed BM enthusiast.

A black metal project out of San Francisco and the brainchild of one Wrest, aka Jef Whitehead, who handles all the instruments and most of the vocals — Lurker of Chalice eschews the more aggressive aspects of the genre in favor of more ambient, goth-y flavors. On Lurker’s 2005 debut (recently reissued by Southern Lord), Wrest whips up tornados of distortion and angst — particularly on “Piercing Where They Might” and “Vortex Chalice.” But it’s the trippy, oppressively claustrophobic tracks like “Paramnesia,” “This Blood Falls as Mortal Part III” and “Fastened to the Five Points” that really set Lurker apart from the rest of the corpse paint brigade.

On the 2006 debut by Norwegian black metal duo Mord, vocalist/guitarist Nordra busts out some utterly unintelligible lyrics, and the album’s song titles (“Opus I” through “Opus IX”) leave no clue as to what the songs are actually about. But given the album’s title, as well black metal’s proclivity for Christ-punching, let’s just assume that Mord are really, really pissed that their Viking ancestors abandoned their pagan faith back in the ninth and tenth centuries AD. We’d tell ‘em to cheer up, that it’s unhealthy to hold thousand-year grudges; but then again, if that deep-seated anger can produce music that’s this beautifully cathartic, we’ll just get out of their way and let them rage.

Clearly, these drugged-out Brits wouldn't exist if it weren't for early Black Sabbath. Each of the songs on this 30-minute mini-album rides a lumbering, distorted groove fueled by reverberating power chords, booming bass and menacing drum fills. The only thing missing is Ozzy's cries of "We love you all! Go fucking crazy!" And yet, Electric Wizard are credible precisely because they out-Sabbath Sabbath. There's no effort to find a melody or pursue a chorus on Supercoven. The songs are driven purely by the pulse of their own monochromatic riffs, achieving mind-altering euphoria through sheer repetition. In other words, these guys take their stoner metal seriously. You might not walk around whistling their tunes or anything, but as long as there's a little kind bud around, Electric Wizard will keep the bowl burning bright.

Trampled Under Hoof puts together the best Goatsnake performances in the short form, accentuating the band's superb interpretations of songs by Saint Virus and Black Oak Arkansas. Singer Pete Stahl (formerly of DC hardcore mainstays Scream) is at his most lugubrious on Vitus' "Burial at Sea," a number that Scott Reagher’s wail originally turned into a classic of stoner rock. Turning the mood completely around, Stahl electrocutes for BOA's "Hot Rod," delivering an on-fire Jim Dandy Mangrum tempered with Howlin' Wolf. The rest of the EP comes down squarely in the early heavy metal of 1970-72, thumping and rumbling riff-rock driven by the bummed-out blooz of white boys.