Earth 2 - Special Low Frequency Version

The quotes on the back of the jewel case ("...a physical presence in the room... I can almost touch the sounds."; "I feel alert yet very calm... Wonderful after a hard day.", and so on) greatly amuse me because I'm sure that for every piece of positive criticism this album got, another five people were calling it "lame hippie bullshit" or "tryhard ambient crap". And honestly, they wouldn't be too far off - Earth 2 isn't horrible or anything, but it's a far cry from "MY TENSION HEADACHES HAVE DISAPPEARED!" or whatever other sort of weird voodoo magic that people are trying to attribute to this album's dronage.

I'm honestly amazed that Earth constructed genius songs like "Geometry of Murder" and "Ouroboros Is Broken" and then decided that this was the most logical progression from that. Hell, everything about this release screams to me that it should come chronologically earlier in Earth's career: compared to Extra-Capsular Extraction, the guitar tone is weaker (the actual tone is buried under a massive amount of bass), there's no drums to speak of (though in Earth's defense, the last track sort of features them [read: by "drums", I mean a cymbal hit every minute or so], so their absence on two of the three songs was apparently intentional), and the riffs are just generally dumber, less catchy, and universally feature this moronic, caveman-ish, "Just picked up a musical instrument for the first time and it looks like if you move your fingers around the instrument, you can make more than one sound! Cool!" sort of melody that doesn't do much of anything towards creating an atmosphere.

I usually try to listen to the albums I'm reviewing while I'm writing about them, just to make sure that I haven't mistakenly claimed that "Hammer Smashed Face" has the best kazoo solo I've ever heard in metal or whatever. However, I've written over half of this review so far listening to some dope-ass nu-metal, and I'm pretty sure that if I wanted to, I could write about this album entirely from my relatively stale memory of it (keep in mind I usually listen to this album in the background instead of trying to actively focus on it) and my review would still be factually accurate, because I really can't stress how little actually goes on throughout this album's 73-minute length. There are probably five or six riffs spread throughout the entire course of Earth 2, but none of them are really decent enough to justify recycling them to such a ridiculous extent.

The first song "Seven Angels" is the one I'm most familiar with for three reasons: for one, it's the first song on the album, and thus the one I'm most likely to pay attention to before going "fuck, this is boring" and zoning out to focus on my studying or wanking; secondly, it's "relatively short" (by which I mean fifteen minutes, but by Earth 2-era Earth standards they probably thought this was "You Suffer"-esque in brevity); three, it's one of the most fucking annoying attempts at drone I've ever heard. The guitars are playing far too fast for the listener to just sit back and soak them in as ambience; they sound like stoner riffs written with Earth's signature Caveman Melodies™. Well, that, and the humming, about-as-un-"in-your-face"-as-possible guitar tone doesn't help the riffs, but there's a bigger problem here. As I said earlier, "there's no drums". Not even buried drums. No. Fucking. Drums. Have you ever heard a guitar act as the sole source of rhythm for a fifteen-minute song? Can you imagine how much awkward chugging it takes to keep a rhythm consistent for that amount of time? You honestly probably can't - seriously, if this were a bit faster and not so downtuned, then Earth would have created the first slam death metal song in 1993. "Teeth of Lions Rule the Divine" is probably the best song here, and not just because its name was used by a drone band whose sole album is infinitely superior to this one. It's slower, and while the riffs are still pretty stupid, at least the attempts to keep a rhythm aren't as awkwardly deliberate. This actually feels like, well, drone. Granted, drone that runs for about 25 minutes longer than it reasonably should considering the ideas presented, but drone nevertheless!

For the final track, it appears that Earth just decided to become complete smartasses. It's as if they said, "Oh, you thought that was slow? Well, watch this!" and played an open A on their guitars, then walked away from the recording booth and went to a local coffee shop, all the way there snickering like a preteen delinquent: "Heh heh heh! Some poor fucker's actually going to pay us money to hear this!" If you have superhuman lungs, you can hum a low A for 30 minutes and maybe occasionally shatter a glass plate on a tile floor, and in doing so you will have constructed a true-to-the-original cover of "Like Gold and Faceted". This is as lazy as drone gets, plain and simple, and probably took less than half its running time to conceptualize.

The album's idea of dynamics is mostly "let the same riffs repeat ad infinitum, but have some small noisy feedback occasionally pop in and out", and surprise surprise, it doesn't work. The ridiculous length of these songs cannot be justified as they don't even build up to anything grandiose or magnificent - all three of the tracks here are loops of six minutes (or in the last track's case, about three seconds) of material basically copy-pasted to create a full-length's worth of music.

I listen to this album a lot more than my amount of criticism for it would warrant, mostly because I find it hard to work on essays and the like without noise in the background, but anything with any sort of dynamics will attract my attention more than the task I'm supposed to be doing. This album is the epitome of pointless noise with nothing about it worth focusing on, so it works perfectly for this sort of vegetating. That, and it's over an hour long so I don't have to walk back and forth between my CD player and wherever I'm sitting very often to press the play button again. So, overall, great for lazy people who need something to blare in their ears or else they shut down, but my God, pity the poor soul who actually tries to actively listen to Earth 2 - if you're that guy, then Jesus fuck, go listen to Khanate's debut or practically anything but this, please. The prototypes of good genres are rarely ever excellent or anything, but it's hard to do a worse job at that than this album does.