Music is the closest thing to religion that I have, and the closest I get to praying is subconciously chanting along to
Om records when I'm fucked. Their first, Variations On A Theme (
Holy Mountain), is so good that I had to restrain myself from gnawing my own foot off in jealous excitement when I first listened to it - excitement cos Sleep's rhythm section had finally put the bong down for an hour or so and made a new record and jealous because a. this is a record I'd love to have made, and I don't think that about much music, and b. I'd give away a lung to have a rhythm section this fucking good to kick planet-sized riffs around with. The new one though, Conference Of The Birds (again, Holy Mountain), is even fucking better, a sound object of singular, glowing, monolithic beauty that tells reality to just fuck off for the half-hour or so of it's duration.
Two tracks, thirty three minutes is all you get this time. The first, At Giza, opens in a shimmering heat-haze of cymbals and bass feedback before coalescing into a beautiful mid-paced loping groove, Al's (clean!) bass riff slowly evolving as time passes, entwining with the subtle, rolling drum work of the Hakius* as he intones his unique brand of transcendent uplift **. Ultra repetitive, yet in constant flux, Om avoid the main pitfall of so many bands of this ilk, the belief that it's enough to play one riff over and over again as long as it's really bassy and really distorted without regard for texture or nuance. Which is the key word here. Nuance. Go on, say it again, it's a lovely word to say out loud. Nuance is everything in Om's music, the tiny details which reveal the beauty of the overall structure. The way both Al's basslines and lyrics simultaneously and subtly change over time, a note here, a touch of phasing or filtering there, the way the bass tone gets fuzzier as the song continues but so gradually you barely notice it, so small are the increments of change. It's so simple, just a bass. a voice and a drumkit, intermeshed so tightly that every tiny change seems magnified and meaningful. The atmosphere this song creates is incredible too, like draping a translucent psychedelic overlay over the world for a quarter of an hour, almost like a reverse of the drug fuelled dread of The Green Manalishi (With The Two Pronged Crown) by Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac, which is about the only other track this song calls to mind, even though they sound nothing like each other. It's only in the final couple of minutes that they unleash the full power of the fuzz -fuelled bludgeoning machine, and even though you sort of know it's going to happen, it's still fantastic and y're flung into the sky with the birds that they reference constantly. Fucking sublime.
The second track, Flight Of The Eagle, is a slight return to the sound of the first album, a slowish, hugely fuzzed riff monster locking horns with the Hakius, whose drumming on this song is just fucking wonderful, he truly is the Ed Blackwell of metal, if you can still call Om that - and I'm not sure you can anymore - I've made this connection before, put it seems particularly apposite to repeat it. Like Blackwell, he has the ability to never play a bar of music the same without recourse to trickery or grandstanding or descent into abstraction, a sensitivity to the needs of the music which marks out the true improviser, the drummer as musician as opposed to timekeeper, unfortunately an all too rare quality in music outside of the jazz sphere in my opinion. Even though this track is so heavy it's like listening down the gravity well of a gas-giant, it still maintains the perfect three-way balance between voice, bass and drums in a manner which again, reminds me of jazz more than anything else, every note and strike of a drum or cymbal in it's place and with perfect poise that makes me think of Free Fall by Jimmy Guiffre, Paul Bley and Steve Swallow - a group whose music couldn't be further from Om's if it tried, but whose delicate abstraction carries itself with the same poise, the same sureness of the moment. Truly a fucking glorious album.
*San Jose's distant cousin of the Sasquatch.
**I'm not being sarcastic here, somehow Mr Cisneros's lyrics, which on paper look utterly preposterous, translate into something altogether Other when combined with the glory of the Om's sound. Even lines like "And lighten pon day - the solarics rise - falls upon the ziggurat electron school" make perfect sense in Omworld.
Ladies and gentlemen, we are about to lose a seriously important part of our (South) London heritage. The Young's Brewery is going to shut cos they're merging with Charles Wells and relocating the brewery to the CW site in Herts (I think). Now CW make a decent pint, but it ain't in the same league as Young's beers. The water will no longer be drawn from the old well in Wandsworth by the Thames and this is fucking wrong. You don't make sparkling wine in Belgium and call it Champagne, and there is no fucking way that the distinctively London taste of Young's various glorious ales is going to stay the same, and that is a bleedin' shame. Anyone who grew up in South London will remember the drays drawn by the beautiful shire horses that delivered the beer to all the pubs up until a few years ago. And anyone who likes real beer has, at some point, knelt in supplication at the wonder that is a pint of Winter Warmer, the only beer in the world so good it makes me want to screw the barrel it comes out of. I want questions asked in Parliament about this. I can't see the Italian government sitting back and watching the producers of Barolo sell their land for luxury fucking flats and grow the grapes in different soil, can you? Not pleased, not pleased at all. Plus their pubs are wonderful too, real old-fashioned boozers with beautifully kept cellars and eccentric staff, just as a proper pub should be. The one in the photo, the Dog and Bull , has been a wonderful oasis in the cutural wasteland that is Croydon for as long as anyone can remember, is one of the greatest pubs in the known universe and if CW fuck with it, there's going to be a lot of upset South London chemical heads, not to mention the mad bastards from Surrey St market, beating a path to their door. You have been warned.
