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Earth, "Hibernaculam"
Earth might well be pioneers, but Hibernaculam feels like its treading water and diluting what made Dylan Carlson's project so great. Cleaned up and thinned out, these three re-versions of Earth tracks and a b-side feel like empty filler. Celebrating repetition over creating atmospheres, this is Earth hollowed from the inside out, the shell of the tracks brittle and insubstantial. By attempting to recontextualize Earth's music within classic American music forms means that it has lost what made it great; the fact they didn't fit in.
The drone is gone, and the riffs, like well kept graves, are stiffly arranged in recurring blocks, even becoming a little comedic in their moodiness. Redoing this material in a style similar to Hex, just doesn't work. Cutting "Ouroboros is Broken" right back means that the very moment when it breaks free of the AOR trudge is the point where the song ends. The expanse of desert horizon is only just visible after the meandering plod, the 1991 version leaves the listener stranded there. The reiteration of the riff in "A Plague of Angels" creates boredom, not trance. Its predictable chord changes following the dramatic style of copyists Sunn 0))); where once Earth led, now they follow. Carlson's loss of plot and attempts to move Earth from their epic drone/doom rock place the band in the dire overpopulated swamp of instrumental rock.
The documentary disc "Within the Drone" is a poor companion piece, and while it might help to put cracks in their myth which can only ever be a good thing, it doesn't exactly hold the attention. The long shots out the front of the tour bus might manage to fully express the boredom of that 2006 European tour, but the live clips of Earth on stage shouldn't be doing the same thing. The performance footage is laborious, sounding thin, stretched and dull rather than the elephantine widescreen of their early records. The interview footage of Carlson and his tales of what he nearly managed to do between being fucked up or being in rehab are average but tantalizing. They only serve to show what might have been had he made Earth the focus of his time, instead of skag. Laying off the cigarettes wouldn't kill him either, sounding he's permanently just in the process of waking up after a night on the tiles. He does get into an interesting area when he gets into his interest in drone, but the majority of his conversation lacks anything of any real substance.
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