If Channel 5 ever commissions Extreme Gigging With Robson Green, Sunn O))) would be a fitting band for episode one. These Seattle drone metallers, famed for playing deathly deep-end soundscapes at volumes designed to “massage the listeners’ intestines into an act of defecation”, are no ordinary alchemists of the brown sound. Their unsettling elemental assault has seen them embraced by conceptual artists, the promoter All Tomorrow’s Parties and Scott Walker, with whom they released a collaboration album, Soused, last year. They can play alongside Pig Destroyer at doom-metal festivals or at David Byrne’s Meltdown. This is art metal, so empty your bowels – just in case – and consider.
Drifting on to a smoke-drenched stage wearing cowls and amulets, silhouetted before a Stonehenge of speaker stacks, they raise a claw and strike up CandleGoat, a slow-shifting chord cacophony that rearranges your hair follicles and extracts wisdom teeth at 50 paces. After 10 minutes, front-monk Attila Csihar, borrowed from Norwegian death metallers Mayhem, starts to babble incantations in the voice of the ocean floor. This is what Baphomet must feel like every time he’s summoned. Plenty flee.
Over 90 minutes, their sound gradually shifts between that of a 747 engine at low throttle and, during the deafening synth throb of Aghartha, a song about a mythical city at the centre of a hollow Earth that was probably recorded there, Satan’s helicopter. There are brief, head-spinning moments when they open the guitar hell-gates and threaten to alter your molecular structure, particularly during a cataclysmic finale screamed by Csihar in a black mirrored cape and crown of spikes, firing purple lasers from his gauntlets like the villain in a Slipknot superhero movie – we’ll call him Captain Tinnitus.
But once you attune to the volume, Sunn O))) are largely a dull indulgence. Their modus operandi is painfully predictable, their Hammer horror aesthetic too schlocky, and where other nosebleed acts such as My Bloody Valentine and Swans bury melodies in their sonic sunbursts, Sunn O))) merely worship decibels and endurance, the musical representation of a slow death from an aggressive disease. Not a first-date band.
