HALLOWEEN….IT’S TIME

Deathly greetings all, how’s your horror-themed listening going . . . what’s that? Not got started? I feel your unfeeling zombie pain, my friend. It’s those pesky midweek Halloweens, isn’t it? Tuesday, my arse.  

What we need is a perky goth-metal pick-me-up and that’s exactly what’s lined up

in a blog somewhere that actually knows what it’s doing.

In other words, not here. We’ll be gearing up for halloweenery high jinks with joyless, beatless bleakness.

Sorry. It’s SUNN O))).

SUNN O))) – A Shaving of the Horn that Speared You

Dare you to sit on your own at night and listen to this from start to end. Not as background, not in daylight, not while cooking or doom scrolling, none of that. Just you. And this. For 15 and a half minutes.

[note: the White1 CD booklet lies. It lists the track as 15’ 36” but in reality it crawls past that marker for two more whole minutes which, in SUNN O))) world, feels like three weeks.] 

White1 is the album where SUNN O))) went prog, I guess. It’s avant drone metal gone batshit crazy with a wild collection of (very occasional) beats, guest voices, swathes of un-monolithic ambience and – wash your eyes, drone fiends – teeny fragments of clean guitar. 

Being an avid Julian Cope fan, I first heard of SUNN O))) through his Head Heritage site where he’d wax hyper lyrical about them alongside Sleep, Khanate, Comets on Fire and too many other freakouts to count, convincing my clueless but curious self to pursue some of these subterranean sonic explorations. So, when White1 came out, it was the no-brainer SUNN O))) entry point, mostly because Cope himself was on it. The Drude was the safety net. 

That track, My Wall, is a stupendous 20-minute tidal surge of low frequency fog ‘n drift that begins the album. Cope’s lengthy ode takes in Romans, Saxons, Vikings, Thor, Death, Ragnarok and more on his poetic voyage, and even SUNN O))) themselves (‘Play your gloom axe Stephen O’ Malley…sub bass clinging to the side of the valley’) get namechecked as Cope sermonises over death-knell riffs and tremorbass vibrations. ‘tis a magnificent gloomer and a genuine Halloween playlister.

But we’re not really here to talk about My Wall (much). Nor are we swinging on the offset hinges of The Gates of Ballard.  

No, this Halloween we’re hanging with SUNN O)))’s biggest sonic experiment to date at that point: White1’s closing track, A Shaving of the Horn that Speared You. 

Spooked the shite out of me on first play.

Admittedly, in hindsight, the conditions were possibly less than ideal. At the tail end of a monster Sunday hangover, it did seem like a good idea to check this brand new album in the end-of-weekend deadzone. So, lying on the floor of a basement bedsit in Hammersmith, headache fading, White1 went on and My Wall lulled.

Fell asleep.

Woke up in panic to deathly exhales, forlorn chimes and backwards, fuck-knows-what effects, terrified because it was all too horribly unsettling and disorienting. That was this, A Shaving of the Horn. It has haunted me ever since. 

Sure, heard in full consciousness and/or daylight, it’s not that extreme. In fact, it’s not extreme at all, especially two decades of drone-and-noise exposure later, but there lies
SUNN O)))’s grasp of atmosphere and future vision. The trademark oppression-by-force is gone. There is no feedback, riff or gloom axe. Instead there’s texture, intense space and undead vocalisms with vibrations that hum and swell. Fragments of orthodoxy – like a clean guitar strike – evade your touch as they warp and dissolve. It’s like you’ve been knocked unconscious and abducted, only to come round in some massive, living slow-breathing tomb while people outside ‘fix’ things.   

Groaning and oozing. Death breaths. Things that should be inanimate but aren’t. This is what the track conjures. No climax, no payoff, no sudden death ending, nothing but a slo-mo creep masterclass. Dance to THAT, Tuesday Halloweeners.

PREDICTABLE FALSE ENDING ALERT

We need at least one gasp of light relief after all that nightmare psychedelia, so how about sticking this on your playlist? Old-school wormhole guaranteed to follow.

BLACK SABBATH – The Shining

Think ‘80s Sabbath’ and you might think Dio. Fair enough, but that was all over by 1982. Really, it’s the Tony Martin years that best define Sabbath metal in the 80s and The Shining has it all: killer riff, soaring vocal hook, nailed-to-1987 keyboards and posturing videos with dry ice and windswept women with birds. Lots of Tony crosses too. Extra points here for Martin’s un-Sabbath fashion sense … but then again, all of Sabbath was un-Sabbath by this point. Rocking tune, ripe for a Halloween replay. Rise up!  

Need another scorching cold Halloween selection? Check this Type O Negative goth downer