OM - God Is Good (Discussion & Love thread)

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Artist: Om
Album: God Is Good
Release Date: September 29
Label: Drag City

Tracklist:

01 Thebes
02 Meditation Is the Practice of Death
03 Cremation Ghat I
04 Cremation Ghat II

Notes: First album from this drone-metal duo since Emil Amos replaced Chris Hakius on drums. Recorded by Steve Albini.

This band is so, so fucking boring. I do not get the love at all.

(My impression may be colored by the fact that I interviewed the bassist once and he was a humorless prick.)

what do you call that christian-y painting style they've been using on their covers lately?

psyched for this obvs

02 Meditation Is the Practice of Death

this is making me think about things

that painting style is called byzantine, if i'm not mistaken

of course, thankig u

will need to sample to see if new drummer holds up.

he's been on a live recording or some shit iirc??

Yup...Having heard the recent live recording, and seeing the previous line up live, I can honestly say that Hakius will be sorely missed..

I just hope the new drummer fits more with the new material...

what do you call that christian-y painting style they've been using on their covers lately?
that's what it looks like all over inside orthodox christian churches. icons and such

hakius is just not gonna be replaced. they'll really need to rejigger their style to fit with the new guy's lame, snappy snare drum sound and lightfooted style. hope it's good.

will need to sample to see if new drummer holds up.

Have you heard Grails? He's good... it's just a matter of making the shoe fit.

hes a great drummer. Live Conference is due for release any day now on Important.
http://importantrecords.com/twitter/om_conference_vinyl.jpg

i've never heard grails. it's just real hard to imagine this band w/out hakius because his combo of heaviness and splashiness is pretty unique.

I love Grails.

chris "HARD RAIN" hakius

hah

Grails is indeed great.

the new drummer sounded a good fit on their recent single release (and yes, this is a fact free post)

grails won me over. I saw them live (opening for om, actually) and thought it was just about the most boring thing ever. but I checked out their last one anyway, and yeah, it's pretty good. maybe just something best appreciated on a sofa instead of standing around in a rock club with my arms crossed while drinking overpriced brews.

should be interesting seeing how this new drummer fits. in my mind, what really worked for om was how their whole sound was predicated on the unique counterplay they'd developed by simply playing together for many, many years. I get the same feeling listening to minutemen records. (not saying these guys are as good as the minutemen...)

anyway, I'd say that if you're not nodding your head after a few minutes of this song, om probably aren't your band.

and unperson, dish it out! why did you find the bassist to be a humorless prick?

liking the sleeve on that live lp but am a little wary since I got burned on that southern lord one. ugh.

grails is just okay. half their shit is cool as hell but the other half just sounds kinda lame stoner/post-rock shit w/ 'mysterious' middle-eastern vibe.

but amos (drummer) is pretty good imo. hakius kills for sure and i don't know if the first 3 albums will be topped but i thought 'gebel barkal' was fucking awesome.

This band is so, so fucking boring. I do not get the love at all.

― unperson, Thursday, July 30, 2009 6:39 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

countdown til unperson's next post is that 'they sound like tool'

am psyched for 'god is good' btw

Me too looking forward to this.

I can't quite put my finger on why I don't like these guys. I really want to, and I like lots of other drone metal. I think maybe it's because they're too organic? Like--Sunn & Earth don't sound like people in a band making music to me, they sound like these massive mechanical objects redlined and left alone in front of microphones. OM sound like a couple dudes recording Gregorian metal, and the fact that they just sound like two dudes instead of mysterious sound entities kinda ruins it for me.

tbh that might be why i like them. i get kind of bored w/ sunn o))) & the early earth albums (need to give them more of a listen tho).

& i kinda like how om never really struck me as more than that, i guess. just two dudes really, really into early sabbath + 'set the controls for the heart of the sun' and not much more than that, like they're exploring that combination as far as it goes. like i don't know if they are a 'great band' or whatever but i really love the angle on they've been exploring. it's something i prob won't get sick of even tho i know most of their stuff sounds pretty much the same

also i think earth & sunn are prob the wrong comparison point for these guys even tho they get lumped in w/ them all the time (owe that mainly to the wire magazine & edwin pouncey esp. i guess). i used to call them that but now i realize that i don't really think of them as 'drone metal' - these guys make some pretty dynamic riffs and they don't really drone at all

why did you find the bassist to be a humorless prick?

Cause I asked him somewhat lighthearted questions and he got all shirty like I was making fun of his religion or something. It's just music, dude. Lighten the fuck up. I had the same problem with the d-bag from Earth Crisis, yammering on and on about animal rights while wearing Nikes.

i will throw out my standard line that the right comp for om is something like tauhid- or karma-era pharoah sanders.

It's very good.

the first side is pretty good, the new drummer doesn't sound too lightweight on it. something's changed about the vocals that i'm not sure i dig. second side feels a bit flaily and noodly at times, but "cremation ghat II" is some pretty awesome krautrocky dope.

wanna hear an om/jajouka collaboration.

with this and the new sunno))) i was kinda wary about the added instrumentation but upon listening i find it very pleasant to hear how these other sounds fit into the whole "eternal vibration" thing

this out yet?

i think yesterday.

in the US, anyway.

nope 9/29

WELP guess it got pushed back three weeks.

drag city is taking pre-orders

how is that conference live thing anyway

shitty prob

nah j/k. i haven't heard it. was just thinking about the horror stories wrt the live in jerusalem thing

its great. much much much better than live in jerusalem

yeah, it's decent sounding. al's voice still falls apart a little live.

Off-putting review of this in this month's Wire. (Not that I should let the bloody Wire put me off anything). The gist of the review is that OM have gone smooth and polite, "with generic sitars and bongos thrown in for good measure".

I'm getting this anyway, of course --- But can anyone who's heard this give ideas about how it sounds?

gonna give it a listen tonight but oof not liking these descriptions

released 18 Sept in Germany, 21 Sept in UK and 29 Sept in France. I feel lucky I live in Germany....

It's streaming on the Drag City site.

does it only stream like 30 seconds?

It was so drone-y through my laptop speakers that I couldn't tell.

it kinda reminds me of Opal's Happy Nightmare Baby, tbh--albeit in a far more meditative, less bone-crunching way, for the most part. i like it.

for some reason nothing happens when I click on the play-button of the streaming tracks... many thanks for the link though -- I'll try later.

u have to wait for the entire thing to load and then you get a 30 second sample. so don't bother. nice that drag city's new site sucks as hard as its old site.

man, I just can't hang with these dudes. I like Sleep! and High on Fire! and Earth! and a lot of other kinda sludgy and/or minimal metal stuff--but to these ears they sound like a slight upgrade of the dreaded Godheadsilo.

Fans of BMX biking and Mountain Dew, godheadSilo played shows all across the United States and inspired countless noise rock bands.

haha

haven't heard this yet but i'm more or less a stan of these guys so far so i'm sure i'll like it, so long as they don't change the formula too much

The Wire's review is full of shite

The Wire's review is full of shite

despite it being an attractive mag covering music i like, it is often full of shite

The wire's reviews are generally kinda useless except as a guide to what's coming out. They do have pretty good features from time to time, however.

As both a Wire contributor and an Om non-fan, I must register rote disapproval. Only rote, though, because I haven't actually read the review in question.

^^ read that as Om nom

They really missed a trick ingoring that as an album name.

i like the wire. they had a really nice picture of david toop's writing desk in one issue. i should subscribe.

$82 dollars though? or $90 if you want the digital subscription as well? Seems a bit much.

I like the Wire. Some guy called Phil wrote a really nice piece on Rashied Ali in the new one. Also, there's a smart-looking interview with Iancu Dumitrescu.

cremation ghat ii mp3 available on pitchfork. this is sweet i have no idea why ppl would be down on this.

been playing this all week... wasn't expecting from the new drummer after the last single, but this actually is pretty damn good.

One side long heavy piece in the vein of the previous records. The remaining tracks do show quite a bit of development, with some sitar-drones, flute and some variance in the rhythms.

Have changed my opinion of the new drummer, some of the fills, especially on the first track are pretty crazy..

on first listen i didn't like it

"$82 dollars though?"

For 14 issues? It seems pretty cheap to me.

really? nyer for instance is like $40 for like 45 issues

anyways i'm prob gonna download this today or tomorrow if i can b/c i'm definitely gonna buy it when it comes out

New Yorker is domestic and has a much wider audience. For a specialist magazine it's not that much. Like $5-6 an issue.

remember when that zoviet france guy posted about the wire here? that was great

I never listen to my own music and can't abide much of what is touted by others in the thinking press..whatever that is. The Wire was an excellent magazine about 13 years ago, when it was a genuinely eclectic mish mash of musical genres. Now you have flavour of the month asswipe electronica half-wits, those guys who have just discovered the faust tapes for the first time and feel like they have made an archaeological find. I fell out of this space years ago when I found out that most if not all of the experimental records (or indeed bands) touted by the so called thinking press are only touted because they pay for advertising space. Old trick. Shite.
I buy TONS of music, new and old but wouldn't dream of wasting my money on some architect who seeks to win phoney prizes with phoney academic institutions for making records that sound like exploding cement mixers.

Spare me from the misery of another record by boring intellectual half-wits, baseball headed men, mobile telephone wielding arts council lackeys, loveys, doveys, southern bastard art grants, norman foster designed concert building types, ex-flour mills full of boring norwegians (with apologies to all non-boring norwegians) and people who sleep in darkened bedrooms listening to other peoples music and commenting on what they do or don't like.
...knitting circle.

― markspybey, Sunday, May 14, 2006 7:50 PM (3 years ago)

There is a difference between the way musicians view the 'thinking press' and afficianados of 'interesting' music. A few years ago, a friend thought it was fun to invite me to a "Wire' bash at a swanky pub (more like a wine bar serving expensive Germanic beer) in a swanky part of London and I went. It was full of loveys and doveys and swanky ex-NME types and writers who braved the sun to leave their squalid, darkened nests. The 'flavour of the month' musicians were there in leagues, the feted, the fancied and the eminently dull. The architects, the mad inventors, the underwater violinists and the curved balls. What a miserable collection. Who is Marissa Merchant?

Frankly Mr.Shankly, it's a sickening wreck.

"I just think it's sort of silly to dismiss all good press on experimental groups as resulting from adverts-- depends on the press, the group, and the amount of advertising saturation."

If you pay good money for an advert, do you get a bad review?

― mark spybey, Monday, May 15, 2006 12:11 PM (3 years ago)

That's hilarious. What are loveys and doveys though?

ha i don't know. i love that line "ex-NME types and writers who braved the sun to leave their squalid, darkened nests."

lol @ "underwater violinists"

Alex: lovey-dovey is a British adjective: making an extravagantly sentimental or showy display of affection.

"Lovey-dovey types" is often used to describe pathetic actors, musicians who go around telling each other how wonderful they are.

Robin Storey from Rapoon (also ex Zoviet France) did a track called 'Fuck The Wire' about 10 years ago...

XD

actually, i'd settle for a big stack of back issues to read. i'd sit around all day and read them and listen to experimental music! that would be awesome. i want a big stack of old option magazines too.

or a stack of OP magazines. i've never read one! how sad is that?

"actually, i'd settle for a big stack of back issues to read."

I think if you get a digital sub you can access all the back issues they have online. That's only like $45 a year or something.

does the bass guitar seem low key on this release or is it just my shitty ipod headphones?

it never really roars

the production is weird on this one. everything seems sort of distant. maybe a little bit more reverb on the drums and vocals. i think the only song i really like is the last track.

i could totally see Al Cisneros as that intense spiritual stoner guy who is at some party in high school, and finds a crappy old acoustic guitar with 2 strings on it, and ends up performing for a small group of awestruck druggies while everyone else is doing keg stands and jell-o shots.

i could totally see Al Cisneros as that intense spiritual stoner guy who is at some party in high school, and finds a crappy old acoustic guitar with 2 strings on it, and ends up performing for a small group of awestruck druggies while everyone else is doing keg stands and jell-o shots.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9JYq-mXprw

hahaha

lol

yeah i hate the mix on this. fuck u steve albini

mixed feelings on this - i only listened to it once tho. there was an absolute simplicity/minimalism on the earlier records they had really managed well (and to a pretty high refinement especially on pilgrimage) that i think is kind of lost here.

amos is a solid drummer imo but did he bring the hokey mysticism 'eastern viiiibes man' shit from grails with him? yea i know there is a degree of hokiness w/ cisneros lyrics etc but it didn't matter when he & hakius just crushed and pummeled you w/ those riffs/rhythms

I feel you on that last point. was a little surprised at how much a few of the tracks sounded like grails songs... but it's growing on me.

i don't think what they're doing here is entirely out of line with the last couple of records, but the production sucks and the vocals really don't sound good at times. new guy sounds way better than on the 7", for what it's worth.

honestly, I was never really too big on pilgrimage either. hate the way that one is sequenced.

i don't think what they're doing here is entirely out of line with the last couple of records, but the production sucks and the vocals really don't sound good at times.

^^^

Sep 17 Neumo’s Seattle, Washington
Sep 18 Biltmore Vancouver, BC
Sep 19 Doug Fir Portland, Oregon
Sep 24 The Independent San Francisco, California
Sep 25 Echoplex Los Angeles, California
Sep 26 Casbah San Diego, California
Oct 6 Bottom Lounge Chicago, Illinois
Oct 8 Magic Stick Detroit, Michigan
Oct 9 Wrongbar Toronto, Ontario
Oct 10 La Salsa Rossa Montreal, Quebec
Oct 11 Europa Brooklyn, New York (with Six Organs of Admittance)
Oct 12 Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, Massachusetts (with Six Organs of Admittance)
Oct 13 Bowery Ballroom New York, New York (with Six Organs of Admittance)
Oct 14 Johnny Brenda’s Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (with Six Organs of Admittance)
Oct 15 DC9 DC, Washington DC (with Six Organs of Admittance)
Oct 16 Cat’s Cradle Carrboro, North Carolina (with Six Organs of Admittance)
Oct 17 The Earl Atlanta, Georgia (with Six Organs of Admittance)

Dec 10 Asylum Birmingham, UK
Dec 12 All Tomorrow’s Parties Minehead, UK
Dec 14 Koko London, UK

so i guess they hate baltimore and i'll have to trek to dc again?

i did finally listen to this. thebes is great and stands with their best. the other three tunes are a bit of a letdown--i think it needed one more fuzzed bass riff near the end of the record to balance things out.

also:

“TRANSMISSIONS FROM SINAI”
(Arthur 0005)
curated by AL CISNEROS (Om, Sleep)
cover artwork by ARIK ROPER

Track listing:

1. Lichens - “Kopernik Trip Note” (previously unreleased)
2. Linval Thompson - “Wicked Babylon”
3. Grouper - “Everyone in Turn”
4. Current 93 - “Mockingbird”
5. Scott Kelly - “The Ladder In My Blood”
6. Quixotic - “The Breeze”
7. Hush Arbors - “The Valley”
8. Mia Doi Todd - “Night of a Thousand Kisses”
9. Six Organs of Admittance - “Bar-Nasha” (previously unreleased)
10. Holy Sons - “Drifter’s Sympathy”
11. Pantaleimon - “At Dawn”
12. Grails - “Acid Rain”
13. Sir Richard Bishop - “Almeria” (previously unreleased)
14. J. Mascis - “War” (previously unreleased)
15. Wino - “Silver Lining”
16. Alpha & Omega - “David and Goliath”

All proceeds go to supporting Arthur Magazine’s mission. Edition of 1,000. Coming soon. Scroll down for order info.

“Here are sixteen reports, differing approaches that, through their own individualized methods, access the one ground. It’s a privilege and blessing to have known many of the musicians on this disc, to have shared in song with some, and stages with others. In all cases I have been the healed recipient of their craft sitting alone with my headphones… Here is their auditory journal.” — Al Cisneros February 2009

http://www.arthurmag.com/2009/02/14/the-way-of-the-riff

amos is a solid drummer imo but did he bring the hokey mysticism 'eastern viiiibes man' shit from grails with him? yea i know there is a degree of hokiness w/ cisneros lyrics etc but it didn't matter when he & hakius just crushed and pummeled you w/ those riffs/rhythms

― mark cl, Wednesday, 16 September 2009 13:17 (3 weeks ago)

This nails my feelings on this record better than I could have. And I say that as someone who prefers Grails to Om, and thinks Amos is perhaps the best young drummer in underground / noise / drone / whatsit this side of Corsano. But this album is a letdown and makes me worry this band's best days are behind them.

his style seems a lot more ornamented to me where hakius was just happy to ride the groove. i don't even really mind it although sometimes i could use a break from like tom fills.

I saw them live the other week with Lichens, who played along with them. I hope they record something with a Lichens because he definitely added some cool sounds to the night.

That's weird. Saw Om with Lichens several years ago (plus Rick Bishop, I think?), and Lichens was just awful. Primitive loops and aimless moaning, but without any groove, emotion or cohesion to keep it interesting. Just some very tenative noodling. Felt bad for the dude. Maybe an off night?

By "several" I guess I mean "a couple".

hmmm, well i really liked this album on first listen, though i don't have the energy or time to mount any sort of spirited defense of it right now. surprised how many people here didn't like it, though.

xxpost i think lichens did some of the extra instrumentation on the new album

but yeah a proper collaboration would definitely be interesting to hear

btw ppl complaining about the production on this--are you sure you're playing it loud enough? i had to turn my stereo up a lot more than usual but i thought it sounded pretty gd great.

yeah i played this super-loud in my car w/ the bass turned up to +5 (all the way) and the treble set to +2 and it was banging

Yes, loud is the key! My first listen was on my iPod and I liked it, but didn't love it. A very loud listen on the Bose system in my car completely sold me on the album.

i typically don't like their albums at first and it takes a few listens. i do like it better now but the vocals are still seem too upfront and the bass drum sounds muffled or flat. turning the volume up just exacerbates it

they were pretty intense last night. it was a great line-up -- hazy kingdom, lichens, six organs of admittance, then them. amos is a complete monster

can't wait to see them. and then couple weeks after is a weekend of eyehategod and wooden shijps shows and then shrinebuilder in november ~_~

Yes, loud is the key! My first listen was on my iPod and I liked it, but didn't love it. A very loud listen (...) completely sold me on the album.

I'll second this, the new Om is fucking great through a good speaker setup. Interestingly the same policy goes for the Mountain Goats album that just came out. Both do NOT translate well to earbuds or cheap/bad speakers, but sound fantastic and really hit home when they're allowed to fill the room through a great pair of speakers.

so things sound better through good speakers at high volume, this is a revelation

lolll

tbh i like the mix on this. i liked it on 'pilgrimage' too. it's the production on the first om record that sounds kind of shitty imo

so things sound better through good speakers at high volume, this is a revelation

actually i think most music sounds better *quieter* rather than *louder* (maybe not true for metal, though!)

regardless of speaker quality

Really? I find that a lot of music consists of detail that's invisible at low volume, and the louder it becomes, the more dense, detailed and rich it becomes. Like a flower blooming, or some equally mortifying analogy -- the detail is present at low volume, but hidden within. This is especially true when the sounds involved are complex, dirty, distorted. A simple digital synth tone will often sound basically at the same at any volume, but amp + gtr can sound vastly different depending on how loud it is.

There's also listening to music vs. inhabiting it. Sometimes it's nice to have music so fucking loud you can't even think, you just sort of experience it as an environment.

yeah but at loud volume some frequencies drown others out and you lose some of the detail

tbh i like the mix on this. i liked it on 'pilgrimage' too. it's the production on the first om record that sounds kind of shitty imo

― mark cl, Tuesday, October 13, 2009 8:38 AM

agreed, there's something weird about the mix of that and 'conference' that hasn't aged well for me. so the new one has those beat at least. my favorites are still the tracks from the 2 split eps

Don't get this. Conference is a magnificent sounding record, by far the most suitable recording/mix they've gotten, IMO. (Then again, I suppose that if they agreed, they wouldn't have pulled in Albini for Pilgrimage.) Agree that the first one's a little flat at low volume.

listening to conference again, you're right

yea 'conference' i think sounds great, the first one though gets to me sometimes

so things sound better through good speakers at high volume, this is a revelation

Exactly. And some albums benefit from this more than others, which is my point.

new drummer is killer live. the openers were good too. the one guy who i guess is lichens sat in for the om set playing tambourine and the occasional guitar.

i was listening to pilgrimage yesterday and hakius is still so much better imo

ya i can't help but miss his drumming

guy was a genius--jazziest heavy drummer or heaviest jazz drummer i've ever heard.

Pilgrimage is their best imo. great great grate album!

saw them live two weeks ago. I like haikius better too but the new guy ain't bad. his playing style makes the songs feel a little more conventionally structured, for better or worse.

lichens guy added a little flavor too.

and as a side note, the crowd at the venue they played was pretty horrible. couldn't even hear six organs because people talked right over the music. totally annoying. and then some meathead that looked like phil anselmo starts a CIRCLE PIT during om. ridiculous. at one point this jock guy goes flying into some poor longhair just trying to groove on om and sends him crashing into the ground. total buzzkill.

amos' playing live alternated somewhere between 'holy shit!' and 'ok easy on the fills there guy'. also al cut his hair!! kinda looks like greg brady now

http://www.orbitcast.com/archives/greg-brady.jpg

(no homo)

also the dc venue def. had talkers throughout every set which was weird because you had to pay cover to access the second floor. so i guess people paid to just sit at a booth table so the bands could provide muzak to their yakety yak

People do that at lots of shows and it never fails to annoy the ever-living shit out of me.

it was just really bad during six organs because most of the set was solo guitar + vox and was no match for 30 people talking loudly.

chasny was visibly bummed out too. (and even said something like, "I'm sorry... for everything" before the last song.)

People talked through Six Organs at the show I went to recently, too. Whoever booked Master Musicians of Bukkake to open for Six Organs: That was probably not the best call. Master Musicians were ear-bleedingly loud and trippy. Six Organs was like we were suddenly watching some folk guy at Borders. Still rude as hell to talk over him. I just left after three songs.

Master Musicians of Bukkake

grossss

good band tho

Yup they are.. Too bad about the goofy name. I have a few friends who would probably love them, but won't bother due to their name.