Some time ago I was sitting outside at a bar with a friend of mine drinking beer in the summer sun and quietly listening to a struggling air-conditioner unit that had obviously seen better days; its repetitive whirr and occasional clunking provided a near-perfect soundtrack to our lazy/hazy afternoon filled with malted hops and quiet sleepy-stares at ivy creeping up a nearby wood-plank fence. Interestingly enough, that ol' air-box actually made the perfect drone record. I probably wouldn't buy it if I saw it in the local record store (especially with so much other stuff vying for slim coinage these days), but I certainly appreciated the accompaniment that afternoon. That's often the bottom line when it comes to me and drone music these days -- If you expect me to throw down bills for your sparse, tectonic hummmmm, you better put up something fairly significant.

Courting Leviathan would probably give that old air-conditioner a good run for the money, but most of our readers would likely burn me alive or at least laugh me all the way to Hell if I were to recommend they spend their hard-earned cash on something so...ancillary. This is drone metal devoid of any bells and whistles. Just big amps rattling glacial, desultory "riffs" with a duty towards vibration -- the soundtrack to an orca's bowel movement for most. Opener "Go Forward Patient Drones" actually flashes some bubbling bass in its scant 7-minutes, but the whalers -- the 21-minute "For He Was Many" (where the "He" obviously does not refer to riffs) and self-titled track -- rely solely on loooooong riffs that accelerate from 0-to-3mph in a week's time with absolutely no reliance on peppering the corners with spice. Hell, even Sunn eventually realized the need to head towards more elaborate waters with their later catalogue, and I think that's probably what projects like Bring Me the Head of Orion will need to do as well if they expect folks to reach into their pockets for their wares. As it stands, this is something I'd only recommend for true nuts of the genre, and even those would probably need to pick up a book while this baby plays.