We use the word “heavy” a lot when describing rock music, usually in a good-willed attempt to summarise what that wall of distortion feels like, when it’s fuzzy, wah’ed and incomprehensible, as impossible to resist as a chokehold. “Heavy” in metal is someone wielding a car door at your head. “Heavy” for Seattle’s Earth is the footsteps of God. This is a prehistoric land animal heavy. It’s a mythological Titan heavy. It’s Atlas, crushed by the weight of the sky, heavy.
Joined on stage by Jodie Cox (guitar) and Bill Herzog (bass), Dylan Carlson spoke little, joked a bit and kept to his task of building a mountain of sound, layer after layer after layer of guitar. The “drone” in drone metal refers to a persistent note (or sequence), returned to at regular intervals. The exploration can take you far, but you must always return to it; whatever you play, you need to play it first. So the drone note at the start of each bar becomes a lighthouse in the distance – you walk away with the music and turn your head from time to time and see it there, always there, waiting for you reliably, so you can go, go as far as you wish, return if you wish, and take. Your. Time. With. It.
A lesser band would have chickened out. Someone would have yelled at them, “You can’t just play G for 17 minutes!” and they would have cut themselves short, they would have added shredding or dabbled in ear-stretching chord progressions or smashing solos to give their public something to bite into. But the earth beneath our feet isn’t complicated; it is enormous and unmovable. Like their namesake, Earth does not rush. If you’ve ever doubted the importance of a drummer in a band, you need only look at Adrienne Davies. Her movements were slow like swimming in a dream river of treacle, she kept a grip on the tempo as soft and unyielding as tree roots. With a setlist of just about 7 songs for a 90-minute slot, the tension built was hanging onto the end of her extra-long drumsticks.
It had been an intense weekend, there was a whole lot to think about. The feeling was that the music held my hand as I gingerly walked myself through it all, Earth acting the part of a kind stranger at the right place holding you steady in the middle of a mental breakdown, keeping you afloat, while at the same time (and this is important) not letting you bail out of the emotion. No half measures would suffice. Like pushing a broken nose into its right place or giving birth.
With such ambiguous, meditation-inviting song names such as “California and Other Impossible Dreams” or “Scalphunter’s Blues“, what this sort of music moves people through is a secret. But people swayed in each other’s arms. Cried. Pushed their hands into the ceiling to the crescendos. The earth beneath your feet does not listen to you, you listen to it, and Earth isn’t there to explain to you what to feel – it’s there to let you feel. It’s a landscape, an endless expanse, a harsh rocky desert. What you bring is what you get.
They ended on “The Bees Made Honey in the Lion’s Skull”, with its many, many feigned endings, unperturbed to the very end. You join them on their journey, not the other way around. You walk the path laid out by them. You see it through. You shiver.
Mighty is the right word for them. Mesmerizing too.