Earth’s new album Full Upon Her Burning Lips feels packed to the brim with dark hymns summoning a deeply rooted power from the natural world. Despite neither guitarist and bassist Dylan Carlson nor drummer and percussionist Adrienne Davies ever uttering a single word on the entire release, the sprawling album feels like a focused journey into the unknown. They offer mountainous riffs that subtly but consistently build into something clearly grand; they have pulled elements from perhaps the most familiar strains of heavy, doom-feeling rock and metal and purified them into a newly poignant, shining sonic spear. Throughout the entire album, there’s not really any escape from the looming, steadily approaching specter of the duo’s ambitious work. The record feels like an oncoming thunderstorm, slowly but surely rolling in with clear promises of a torrential downpour, gusting wind, and so on. It’s dark, but beautiful.
On Full Upon Her Burning Lips, the band never complicate their craft too much, consistently hitting the listener with their straightforward sonic compositions. They’ve isolated some of the most compelling, even hypnotic compositions they could muster and allowed them to break through on their own strength. There’s not a lot of filler or “shiny things” here — Earth’s newest album feels entirely dedicated to the slowly growing power of their rhythmic, primal beats and riffs.
Emotionally, the new Earth record feels situated in a perfectly complementary spot to the music itself. There’s not a lot of conflict here or wondering about what the “point” is. Where other doom-y rock and metal bands might inject a sort of grinding anxiety into their music, Earth have added nothing, instead allowing the listener’s own experience to fill in the gaps and connecting the band and their audience to the music that much more closely. The songs reach out with confidence, injecting that into the listener while showing them a bit of the beating metaphorical heart that’s underlying the journey into the great beyond, or even more specifically, just into nature itself — power and all. Every element at play in the experience of Full Upon Her Burning Lips becomes something greater in Earth’s hands; their new record is a transcendent, almost even surprisingly trippy experience.
5/5 Stars
The full record is available May 24 via Sargent House.
Listen below via Bandcamp
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