Earth - Full upon Her Burning Lips

Truth be told, Earth has never been one of my go-to bands for drone metal or even just slightly heavier psychedelic doom ambiance. I of course gave their catalog a good few run-throughs when I was younger when I started getting into fringe metal subgenres like drone and doom (not that fringe in the grander scheme of things, but pretty weird to a kid growing up on Metallica and Disturbed), and while I was able to appreciate what albums like Earth 2: Special Low Frequency Version and Phase 3: Thrones and Dominions were suggesting that metal could do in the early 1990’s when the genre was tending toward such extreme thickness and speed with death metal and groove metal evolving into their fearsome early forms and nu metal readying up to take the world by storm. But at the same time, those records were able to be so groundbreaking simply because there was that ground to break, and since Earth openned those gates (which, again, I can appreciate their doing), other acts like Sunn O))) and Boris came through and elaborated on that framework Earth laid. And even Earth themselves went on to expand on their indeed prototype sound, which is why the choice to return to the bare bones approach here is a bit perplexing.

It’s not quite like when a veteran band returns to the fold with some new old-school death metal like Possessed and Nocturnus A.D. (kinda) did this year, where their compositional experience often capable of sustaining their retro aesthetic. But in the case of the type of drone doom Earth are returning to, its appeal was indeed based on its novelty and the creativity with which the band arranged their sprawling drones. Again, I have no principle issues with drone metal, or doom, or minimalism, or all of the above, but Full upon Her Burning Lips surely does not make the strongest case for the style being something special beyond the enjoyment its creators evidently had while recording it.

While repetitious motifs and structures with minimal effects and instrumentation can certainly work well together to create a holistic type of atmosphere, as other bands and Earth themselves have shown in the past, the lack of immersiveness of the crucial component of that equation on Full upon Her Burning Lips makes it a dreadful bore to sit through. And while complaining about boring repetition probably sounds like the kind of complaint that someone unfamiliar with Earth or drone music in general would make, again, I enjoy me plenty of drone metal, plenty of music in bordering subgenres, and other forms of minimal drone music, and the album’s problem is not an inherent one based in minimalism or drone being “bad” or even poorly aesthetically combined. Sure, I found myself longing for Earth to inject some kind of instrumental freshness into the the mix rather frequently across my listens to the album, but not because the minimal instrumentation in itself was deficient, rather because the riffs being indulged in and stretched thin across entire song lengths are not worth being given that treatment to begin with.

And I feel like I have to every time I talk about more atmospheric music, but I want to clarify especially this time since I’m being kinda harsh, that I’m not asking for “Enter Sandman” riffs or “Sad but True” chugging; I’m just wanting motifs that don’t sound like the first thing the band found a groove with and decided to run with. These songs are bland because the repetitions they’re based on are bland and barely expanded upon.

With little in the way of engaging musical ideas to prop up their return to a far more minimal style, Full upon Her Burning Lips ultimately comes across like an extended jam session, a somewhat intentioned if not listless search for the types of ideas needed for the band to succeed in this style again. It’s easy to see the repetitive riff-based trance the band was trying to induce on this album, but with the sluggish motifs the band calls on not reeling strongly enough into the haze they’re trying to conjure, the album’s abandoment of most of the aesthetic flair they’ve made use of in favor of this unilateral reliance on the bland riffs ends up being its downfall.

I don’t like the riffs/10