Label: Southern Lord
Media: CD
Format: Album
WorkNameSort: White 1
"Disorientingly horrific" might not sound like a ringing endorsement for a record, but it's the sort of praise that's appropriate for "White 1", the latest installment from this excruciatingly heavy duo. Though classified within the increasingly broad "genre" of stoner rock, the kind of stoners that Sunn appeals to must be the kind of stoners who do really evil drugs. The kind that make your eyebrows hurt. The kind that make your spine quiver. The kind that make you think really awful thoughts. The kind that make a 25-minute psycho-hallucinogenic poetic ramble from Julian Cope sound perfect when crawling atop the rumbling atmospherics of "My Wall." (Who thought ol' Julian still had it in him?) Along with Cope, Sunn (primarily Greg Anderson and Stephen O'Malley) enlisted Joe Preston -- he, the primary architect of psychotic thunder via his pioneering work with the Melvins and Earth -- space-rock auteur Rex Ritter and doom-metal priestess Ruhnild Gammelsaeter (Anderson and O'Malley's co-conspirator in Thorr's Hammer) for "White 1". Though ostensibly collaborative, the sound is still well within the spacious, paranoiac heaviosity that Sunn is known for. It's scary, it's nerve-wracking, and it's downright genius.
