The Musicgoer: Sunn O)))'s Monoliths & Dimensions

SUNN O)))
Monoliths & Dimensions
(Southern Lord)
**** 1/2 (out of 5)

My home stereo is comically inadequate to the task of properly playing the music of doom-metal duo Sunn O))). Ideally, an album like Monoliths & Dimensions should be played through speakers as large as the slabs of Stonehenge, somewhere out in a forest clearing, at a volume high enough to pull the skin tight against your face, to make every earthworm within a mile radius come wriggling out of the dirt, to turn the sky purple and send the birds crashing from the sky. It should be as earsplitting as that noise on Lost when the hatch implodes and sends the island back in time. This is the kind of music that the Ents in Lord of the Rings would listen to — loud and majestically slow, the tracks stretching out as long as 17 minutes of nothing but ominous power chords lingering in your ears long enough to let you contemplate their texture in the fullest detail. Imagine Link Wray’s “Rumble” played at about 7 RPM, and you’ll have Monoliths & Dimensions.

This is also, paradoxically, one of the more beautiful records of the year so far, a vast, oceanic bath of sound whose effect is to calm rather than agitate. What do people do when they hear Sunn O))) live? It’s impossible to bang your head to this stuff; maybe they just curl up into fetal balls and feel their ribs vibrating.