Om - Live at Jerusalem
July 20 2008 at 09:06:44 PM
Who’s last? Yup, this be the swansong from Al Cisneros and Chris Haikus’ Om: a two-track live LP poorly recorded, barely planned for, and festooned with Gygax via
Magical Mystery Tour cover art. Ostensibly set to tape in 2007,
Live at Jerusalem is an excerpt of a Holy Land record store set that allegedly stretched north of four hours. As in 240 minutes. Half a work-day. Time enough to shit, shower, shave and do it all over again. In case it’s difficult to process: it’s way long. Perhaps too long.
But this ain’t no Riley’s
In C, dig. Factory costs likely kept this from being a six-side affair, replete with Roger Deanesque artwork. How very, um, Boris that would have been. In ideal’s stead we have something like 35-minutes of homogeneity. Guys, playing the same riffs and beating the same beats till they don’t sound like the same riffs and beats doesn’t mean that you’ll be taken any more seriously than a kid who can only blow “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” on his plastic recorder. Gravitas goes to the ones that earn it. Not from seeing who can go the longest minus hard candy.
To wit: Ecstatic “minimalist” extraordinaire Morty Feldman wrote chamber music that got its second wind by the six-hour mark. But Feldman’s pieces transformed second-by-minute-by-hour. Their shapes shifted and fell out of being. Flute and viola and glockenspiel nothing but breath and friction and metallic twinkle. In case it’s difficult to process: Oh, so fucking great. And not too long. Not long at all actually. Prima facie inactive music that’s de facto hyperactive isn’t a tricky sonic trope; it’s magic.
Cisneros and Haikus, who’ve recently parted ways, don’t do much transforming on this LP. There’s little shape-shifting. No becoming and unbecoming. It’s just C-130 drone, grumble bass with traps stitched upon the earth, courtesy of some THC+ bud and a six-foot bong extension. There are moments, albeit ephemeral, where Cisneros comes across as a second-rate John Alec Entwistle with the aid of a whole host of stomp boxes. And there are times—actually throughout most of the record—where I’d rather hear Cisneros’ bass straight up nude. He can even ditch the vox. The Merlinean chant might work for some sort of flaxseed eatin’ TM obsessed honey in a fitted hemp dress and bare feet, but it doesn’t do anything to advance the program. In short, no magic.
Matt Pike must be pleased. Even if High on Fire seems set on making marginal records following the magnificent
Blessed Black Wings, Om never wandered remotely close to Sleep’s line in the sand. The elephant in the room: Om was always a thinner, more banal version of Sleep without the crunch of Pike’s axe. And that this sham boot was recorded in the same location that served apt moniker for Sleep’s masterpiece,
Jerusalem, is only too poignant. Now available from Southern Lord. Of course.
[Stewart Voegtlin]
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