Sunn O))) -‘The Black One’ (Southern Lord, 2005)
I guess the reality is that if you find heavy metal too dark, noisy and full of frightening imagery then this album is not going to change your mind.
However, Stephen O’Malley and Greg Anderson, the two men who make up Sunn o))) (pronounced Sun, so stop worrying about it!) show that as well as being quite scary sounding and extreme, sonically, it can be powerful, artistic and even beautiful. In teaching fifteen year olds about Aesthetics, I have often played ‘It Took the Night To Believe.’ Most of them cannot take it, just as I could not take Philip Glass when I was their age.
Thing is, it’s not heavy metal as it’s stereotyped to be. OK, so here are riffs aplenty, it’s very loud and they have pretty big hair. But that aside, this is slow, expressive stuff. Most recent album Monoliths and Dimensions has seen the band experiment with brass and choirs, while live album Domkirke was recorded in a Norweigian Cathedral.
Hugely influenced by Earth and Black Sabbath, Sunn O))) take metal and play it slow, incorporating noise, drone and ambient. Yes, they sometimes sound like the heaviest thing you’ve ever heard and the slowest. But the sheer scope and width of the way they approach sound and music is breathtaking. Added to which, they introduced me to the likes of Boris, Merzbow, Earth -and made me relisten to the early Sabbath albums.
Proof that if you take an album in small doses and think outside the box, something really wonderful can be revealed.