Sunn O))) & Boris - Altar
March 21 2008 at 01:38:48 AM
East meets West in a recording short on ideas and long on time. And that time is indeed difficult to endure, with impotent six-string rumbling, toothless riffing and sexy, preening female vocals all as half-baked as the concepts that spawned them. Both Boris and SunnO))) currently enjoy a do-no-evil status with the uncritical masses; the truth is that they've both released some decent—even great—records, but their formal obsessions disallow them from creating something as content rich as their earlier works in this "fortified" duo incarnation. Instead, they lazily reheat the same meal, which has lost its savory flavor over time. The odor that surrounds the musical recycling is not without its discolored fangs: these are the same sets of incisors that Wakeman and Howe donned like plastic vampire teeth back in the Pleistocene, churning out one grandiose record after another, holding fast to quasi-mysticism, ethno-academic musical traditions and self-indulgent takes on instrumentation as earned rite. With Altar, several co-conspirators are brought under the tent to make merry: The Honorable Joe Preston, Kim Thayil and Jesse Sykes among them. Preston's contribution garners the most interest, resulting in the 53-minute EP's only listenable track. Soundgarden great Thayil is criminally imperceptible; Sykes is prominent and confrontational, her voice rubbing up against the calves like a cat that hasn't seen wet food in a week. The guitars offer stark counterpoint to all of Sykes' "subtlety," churning out charts built upon a thousand ways to go nowhere; as if someone hipped Sunn's core duo to early AMM, and they've found no reason not to attempt tin-eared emulation while holding their horned hands high. Some will call this record fresh, diverse, cathartic or brooding. It is emphatically none of these: The only thing worshipped at this Altar is the collective ego of this hopefully short-lived collaboration.
[Stewart Voegtlin]
SunnO))) & Boris
Altar
2006
Southernlord
http://www.southernlord.com
print
email
RSS
list
big
small
TWITTER