reax music magazine :: music + culture » Reviews » Earth - The Bee Made Honey in the Lions Skull

For the film Kurt Cobain About A Son, filmmaker AJ Schnack enlisted Ben Gibbard and Steve Fisk to create an appropriately atmospheric and geographically relevant score to accompany Cobain’s spoken words and the stunning imagery of the Northwest that Schnack had captured as a backdrop. With all due respect – and also understanding how publicly tortured Dylan Carson has been due to his relation with Cobain – the music on The Bee Made Honey would have made for a much better soundtrack. Even putting aside Carson’s status as Cobain’s best friend, the vaguely ominous elegance the talented purveyor of sluge/drone has crafted for Earth’s sixth studio record is music that’s absolutely pining to be part of some as-yet-unmade movie. The stark, thudding simplicity of Earth’s earlier work has, over the past two decades, given way to a far more poetic and complex approach to (mostly) instrumental music. While there’s plenty of darkness on The Bee, it’s by no means a heavy album; in fact, lengthy portions of it are positively pastoral in tone. Reflecting an interest in organic tonalities and a bit of classic rock warmth, Carlson and the other three members of Earth have crafted a clutch of compositions that are direct and inviting, but also touched with a sense of sinister foreboding. It’s the least scary album Carlson has yet to do, but simultaneously the one that most clearly demonstrates his ability as a contemporary psychedelicist.  - Jason Ferguson