| Hex; Or Printing in the Infernal Method | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
 | ||||
| Studio album by | ||||
| Released | October 23, 2005 | |||
| Recorded | March–May 2005 | |||
| Genre | Drone doom, post-metal [1] | |||
| Length | 46:29 61:35 (vinyl version) | |||
| Label | Southern Lord (SUNN48) | |||
| Producer | Randall Dunn | |||
| Earth chronology | ||||
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Hex; Or Printing in the Infernal Method is the fourth full-length studio album by American drone doom band Earth.
Marking a new direction the band would follow in years to come, Hex stands in stark contrast to Earth's previous works. While retaining the extremely heavy doom/drone metal song structure of epic riffs over simple repetitive drum beats, the guitar was inflected with country influences that favored a cleaner reverb-heavy tone layered with acoustic instruments over the band's previous predilection for distortion. The press release cited diverse influences such as Ennio Morricone, Billy Gibbons, Neil Young's soundtrack to the movie Dead Man , country musicians Duane Eddy, Merle Haggard, and Roy Buchanan. [2] Carlson indicated that he viewed this shift as part of a continuum rather than a categorical change in direction:
I view music as a continuum and there're different faces that it takes. This is not a genre record. I don't do genre. I've always listened to that music, it's the main thing I'm listening to now. You know, they're the guitar players I admire and they also have, for example, the banjo rolls, going back to the open string, the drone...Basically with all the music I like, the drone is always present. Someone might look at my records and say it's schizophrenic, but there's always that element I hear. Maybe it's delusional, but it makes sense to me, I guess. It's like the Hindu gods where they have all these different incarnations but it's still the same force behind it. [3]
The album was influenced by Cormac McCarthy, particularly his novel Blood Meridian . Every song title on the album is named after a phrase found in the text of the novel. Carlson commented that:
That's the one [Blood Meridian] that's the most violent or occult, but all of his books deal with that theme of the West and the frontier and its violence and effects. It's more about capturing that sense of place. As someone born in America, I definitely consider myself a product of the frontier and the history of it has influenced me. This whole vast continent and these "peoples": "Indians", the white man, they were all forced to deal with this place, an environment that was harsh and demanding and it forced people to react to it in a certain way. Like the "hex" sign itself - the Mennonites are normally super God-fearing people, but when they came to American they had to invent these signs to keep evil spirits away. There's this need to protect themselves from this entity that inhabits the landscape...everything was violent and hard, everyone was violent. [3]
Carlson said that "There's an arc to each song and an arc to the album, rather than just a collection of songs. There's silence and a sense of space to the music". [3] The subtitle is from William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell . It was well received by fans of the band and critics alike despite the change in sound.
When asked about the elimination of distortion, Carlson remarked:
I don't know if it's because I've got cleaner living or not, but the sound that I hear in my head is cleaner now. There's always some harmonic distortion when you have an amplified sound, I mean if you had a pure electric guitar tone it would be pretty uninspiring, but I just started to want to hear more of the resonance of the wood and the metal of the instrument...Sometimes I think that with Earth, although there's not a lot going on because of the distortion and the saturation, it can be quite tiring. I wanted there to be space [on Hex], so the music breathes. [3]
| Review scores | |
|---|---|
| Source | Rating |
| AllMusic |    [4] |
| Chronicles of Chaos | 9.5/10 [5] |
| Exclaim! | (favorable) [6] |
| Pitchfork | 8.2/10 [7] |
Critics acknowledged the sharp transformation in the band's sound and were generally favorable towards Hex. Writing for Pitchfork , Austin Gaines described the album as a "surprisingly beautiful instrumental album" that exchanged distorted riffing for "the austere beauty of a telecaster roaming the Western U.S." [7] In Exclaim! , Kevin Hainey praised the album as "an elegant and singular effort filled with sparsely beautiful passages that lead headlong into the void". [6] Within the band's stylistic transformation, Todd DePalma observed in Chronicles of Chaos "a stripped, damn near ossified sound that yields a more conceptual - and by far the heaviest - album of [Earth's] storied lifespan". [5]
| No. | Title | Length |
|---|---|---|
| 1. | "Mirage" | 1:45 |
| 2. | "Land of Some Other Order" | 7:18 |
| 3. | "The Dire and Ever Circling Wolves" | 7:34 |
| 4. | "Left in the Desert" | 1:13 |
| 5. | "Lens of Unrectified Night" | 7:56 |
| 6. | "An Inquest Concerning Teeth" | 5:16 |
| 7. | "Raiford (The Felon Wind)" | 7:21 |
| 8. | "The Dry Lake" | 3:21 |
| 9. | "Tethered to the Polestar" | 4:42 |
| 10. | "Untitled" (vinyl-only bonus track) | 15:03 |
In music performances, rhythm guitar is a technique and role that performs a combination of two functions: to provide all or part of the rhythmic pulse in conjunction with other instruments from the rhythm section ; and to provide all or part of the harmony, i.e. the chords from a song's chord progression, where a chord is a group of notes played together. Therefore, the basic technique of rhythm guitar is to hold down a series of chords with the fretting hand while strumming or fingerpicking rhythmically with the other hand. More developed rhythm techniques include arpeggios, damping, riffs, chord solos, and complex strums.
Post-rock is a form of experimental rock characterized by a focus on exploring textures and timbre over traditional rock song structures, chords, or riffs. Post-rock artists are often instrumental, typically combining rock instrumentation with electronics. The genre emerged within the indie and underground music scene of the 1980s and early 1990s. However, due to its abandonment of rock conventions, it often bears little resemblance musically to contemporary indie rock, borrowing instead from diverse sources including ambient, electronica, jazz, krautrock, dub, and minimalist classical.
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The baritone guitar is a guitar with a longer scale length, typically a larger body, and heavier internal bracing, so it can be tuned to a lower pitch. Gretsch, Fender, Gibson, Ibanez, ESP Guitars, PRS Guitars, Music Man, Danelectro, Schecter, Jerry Jones Guitars, Burns London and many other companies have produced electric baritone guitars since the 1960s, although always in small numbers due to low popularity. Tacoma, Santa Cruz, Taylor, Martin, Alvarez Guitars and others have made acoustic baritone guitars.
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Post-metal is a style of music that is rooted in heavy metal but explores approaches beyond the genre's conventions. It emerged in the 1990s through the work of bands such as Neurosis and Godflesh, who transformed metal texture through experimental composition. Associated with and inspired by post-rock, post-hardcore, and sometimes shoegaze, the genre employs the darkness and intensity of extreme metal but emphasizes atmosphere, emotion, and even "revelation", drawing on a wide range of sources including ambient, noise, psychedelic, progressive, and classical music to develop an expansive but introspective sound. Post-metal songs are typically long, with loose and layered structures that discard the verse–chorus form in favor of crescendos and repeating themes. The sound centres on guitars and drums; any vocals are usually screamed or growled and resemble an additional instrument.
Pentastar: In the Style of Demons is the third full-length studio album by the drone doom band Earth, released in 1996. It has a more rock-oriented sound than their earlier drone doom work, although in a very minimalist style. "Peace in Mississippi" is a cover of the Jimi Hendrix song. The original vinyl release of the album has an alternative take of "Peace in Mississippi".
Adrienne Davies is the current drummer and percussionist of the drone metal band Earth.
Hibernaculum is a studio album by the American musical group Earth, though acknowledged as an EP by the band. All of the songs, except for "A Plague of Angels", are older Earth songs that were re-recorded in the country-influenced style of Hex. The album includes a DVD with a documentary by Seldon Hunt, called "Within the Drone". Both "Coda Maestoso in F (Flat) Minor" and a "A Plague of Angels" appear in the documentary, "The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia".
The Bees Made Honey in the Lion's Skull is the fifth full-length studio album by the American musical group Earth.
Metal Machine Trio was a group founded in 2008 by Lou Reed, Ulrich Krieger and Sarth Calhoun. The group played free improvised music, touching on various genres from free rock, free jazz, minimal music, noise music, electronica, to ambient music. The group rehearsed to test ideas, but all performances were improvised.
Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light I is the sixth full-length studio album by the band Earth, released on Southern Lord Records. Cello is introduced as a new instrument, along with the usual ones being used since the album Hex. Dylan Carlson describes the album as more melodic and riff oriented. The second part of the album was released in 2012. The album illustrations were created by Stacey Rozich.
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