earth

Earth at Islington Mill last night was inevitably packed by the time the band came on. The set was mostly drawn from The Bees Made Honey in the Lion's Skull. No complaints there - the music was heavier slower and obviously had a far greater physical presence than you can recreate at home without the police knocking on your door. The benches in front of where I was stood were hollow and the music was resonating through them like mad. It was fun to rest a foot against them and feel it. By the end I was going into a trance I remember briefly thinking I have no idea how long this song is before realising I didn't actually care and immersing myself again.

The spaces between notes especially when they start to fall into silence were as important as the notes themselves. It almost takes on a rhythm like breathing slowly rather than say the walking or dancing rhythms we're more accustomed to. People were mostly sat or stood through the performance although toward the end and in the encore a few people were playing air guitar - albeit with a lot more emphasis than anything that was happening on stage. In fact I saw a couple of guys making air guitar strums when what Dylan Carlson was actually doing was moving his left hand on the frets.

To address the inevitable history. If you'd even asked 15 years ago who were the most likely of all the Seattle/Olympia bands to have a lasting influence on rock in the new millennium people would have thought you were crazy if you'd mentioned Earth. They were bit players in the Nirvana story. But then came Sunn 0))). Which left another problem when Dylan picked up a guitar again and revived Earth - what do you do when someone's built a career on your early records and you've been off the scene for five years? Why you change and develop again. Dylan and Earth (which let's not forget was Black Sabbath's original name) seem to be able to transcend anything on their own terms. Go buy the records - look out for the next one whenever it comes - try to catch them live and marvel.