EARTH - Hex, Or Printing In The Infernal Method

Forget the eternal drone and emotional heaviness of an album like "Earth 2", which pioneered back in 1993 what would later come to be called drone-rock. "Hex, Or Printing In The Infernal Method", the fifth official album from Dylan Carlson's creature, breaks down the exhausting fixity of that pioneering sound into nine panels of stretched-out psychedelia that constantly morphs into a veritable kaleidoscope of southern-gothic, chiseled with reverb, tremolo and the occasional flash of heavy fury.

Joined by Adrienne Davies (drums) - with additional support from bass (John Schuller), lap and pedal steel guitar (Dan Tyack), trombone and tubular bells (Steve Moore) - Carlson finds fresh energy for his unconditional praise of slowness, moving with calculated inspiration through boundless vistas and choosing to speak the language of what is, to all intents and purposes, the dark side of the desert. "Desert-music" might actually be an apt description, but it certainly doesn't fully capture every nuance of an approach to rock that has by now earned every mark of "classic" status. "Hex" is like a crystalline mirage after the infernal storms of the band's earliest sonic assaults. Perhaps looking back to the more relaxed, hypnotic atmospheres of "Pentastar: In The Style Of Demons" (1996) will help better orient the gaze within Carlson's "infernal method". A method that remains enigmatic, as "Mirage" itself seems to confirm from the depths of a mysterious fragility, yet one handed over to the most varied lyrical branches and, moreover, besieged by a deep unease.

From this vantage point, the cinematic slow-motion of "Land of Some Other Order" aspires to be recognized as a genuine funeral march for all the presences, visible and invisible, that inhabit the borders of the desert. There, in short, where the symbols of a buried past reveal themselves in step with the seasons. Wandering caravans with no destination, heading toward an inner stillness ("The Dire and Ever Circling Wolves") that, at times ("Left In The Desert"), that wind fixing the stars into a circle of icy splendor conjures up in blurred strokes ("Left In The Desert"). And, in this space-time trembling with life and death, even hope can be ambiguously unbearable.

In the suffocating silence, the spacious chords fiercely underscore a sense of cosmic religiosity, the revitalizing yet unsustainable ardor of an eternal embrace ("Lens Of Unrectified Night"). Fluorescent blades of roots-rock spin in a ring of fire, painting the epic of the frontier now with Morricone-esque touches ("An Inquest Concerning Teeth"), now with grandiloquent whirlwinds of heavy psychedelia ("Raiford (The Felon Wind)"). It's the same frontier glimpsed behind the unfathomable "dark" breath of "The Dry Lake", poised halfway between world-music and isolationist ambient. What remains, then, pure and defenseless, are the remnants of a post-country sound ("Tethered To The Polestar") that chooses to contemplate, with detached wonder, a wild yet pacified land.

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30/04/2026