Once again batting away expectations like flies from
Having admitted that he has felt driven to explore his roots in heavy rock and metal, the great American maverick’s current motives could easily be misconstrued as lazy revisionism, but Primitive And Deadly is anything but a backwards step. Instead, eschewing the instrumental drift and wild frontier menace of his band’s last few records, Dylan has taken his music into fresh but subtly familiar territory, notching up the dominance of overdriven guitars and bringing transcendental vocal mantras into the resultant slow-motion melee. Superficially, something like 11-minute cosmic hymn From The Zodiacal Light adheres to both traditional song structures and accepted definitions of heaviness, and yet the combination of perpetual six-string swell and Rabia Shaheen Qazi’s ethereal voice turn the whole enterprise into an immersive and amorphous crawl through the cracks in perception. As with all Earth records, you could easily lose yourself forever in this somnambulant cloud of sound, but as if to prove its ageless value, the spirit of Black Sabbath is on hand throughout to offer reassuring spectral guidance. The drone lives: vital and free.
Via Southern Lord
