No matter what phase of Earth you’re considering, be it the enormous and electrostatic drones of the band’s earliest and heaviest days or the swaddled blues elegance of their post-millennial reboot, there’s one simple and unifying link: Dylan Carlson is a paragon of guitar control. On Earth 2, he wielded his instrument and amplifiers with a powerful precision, creating sounds that weren’t only big but also topographically rich; you could study the curves and crags of his sound as if you were reading a three-dimensional map of the Cascade Range. When Carlson rebuilt Earth as an instrumental rock band a decade ago, he used his guitar to cut a filigree of exquisite riffs through the bedrock of Adrienne Davies’ patient drumming. Hearing him play during The Bees Made Honey in the Lion’s Skull suggested a woodworker cutting soft, delicate shapes into an enormous oaken block. Whether working on the monolithic scale of Earth’s origins or through the microcosmic scope of its rejuvenation, Carlson has always handled his duties like a master puppeteer with supreme, expressive sway.
The most telling moment, then, of Earth’s latest LP arrives with “Even Hell Has Its Heroes”, an instrumental that finds Carlson fighting against Earth’s need for stricture and structure with bona fide guitar solos. Above a bed of dense, multi-tracked guitars, he even trades licks with Built to Spill's Brett Netson. The song begins as archetypal latter-day Earth, the notes pneumatically bolted to the beat. Carlson’s tone, however, is a bit more pointed than usual, and he and Netson soon unspool the song’s theme into spirals of variations, taking liberties with their leads rather than submitting to Earth's usual economy. Supported by Netson and producer Randall Dunn, Carlson is free to step out near the seven-minute mark; you can almost picture him with his eyes closed and jaw titled skyward, fingers feeling the strings and flying across them rather than calculating where and when the melody must land. It’s one of the most electrifying moments in Earth’s inconsistent quarter-century history, a genuine rock ’n’ roll climax for a band that’s mostly marched slowly, steadily into the middle distance.
Those licks speak to a restlessness that defines Primitive and Deadly, the first Earth album to feature vocalists since Carlson sang a little in the mid-’90s and since Kurt Cobain and Kelly Canary signed on for the group’s earliest work. Former Screaming Trees frontman Mark Lanegan slips inside two tracks, sending up his dark-eyed observations about destructive dawns and grim landscapes with his static, speak-sing clip. Despite Lanegan’s stentorian voice, he gets lost inside Earth’s latticework, his voice often feeling more like a footnote than a new feature. “Children, children, get ready/ You better get ready/ It’s new revelation time,” he musters during “The Serpent is Coming”, trying to twist some soulful cadence into his stiff proclamations but coming across like a revival preacher being overrun by his congregation. During “Rooks Across the Gate”, he reads the text of some macabre fever dream, the Carlson-penned lyrics suggesting the murder ballads he’s encountered in his studies of European folk. Despite the scare of the material, though, Lanegan undersells the images. It’s possible to ignore his echo-enhanced voice altogether, to overlook it in favor of the sharp rhythmic interplay between Carlson, Davies, and bassist Bill Herzog. The idea of Earth’s desolate music augmented by harrowing visions solemnly delivered is an intriguing one, but Lanegan’s execution is inchoate and underwhelming. Next time, perhaps Nick Cave, David Tibet and Julian Cope can be on standby?
