Those with low expectations might still get something out of this new recording by SUNN O))) amp botherer Stephen O’Malley. On first listen, it’s a fairly underwhelming experience on account of its relative sparseness and brevity. Released in the Portraits GRM series, the “album” is a single piece so those who are after a physical copy would be advised to purchase it on compact disc. Not only is this cheaper, it means you won’t have to turn over an LP halfway through listening to the song. Once the CD is out of its shrink-wrap and in the machine, the display will read a total running time of 32:39. That’s fairly tight as far as drone-metal recordings go. Given that O’Malley is operating at his typical snail pace, it doesn’t allow for much musical expansion to occur before everything draws to a close.
But Remember What You Have Had is centred, unsurprisingly, around O’Malley’s signature downtuned guitar chords. They sound thinner than usual, however. It’s as if he’s holding off – even on the track’s heaviest moments – or is simply not as interested in applying as many dense layers of distortion as he has in the past, especially in his group projects. Nor does the recording feel like much of a departure or an experiment. It’s more of a dilution.
One of the piece’s more interesting aspects is the contributions of Hans Teuber and Stephen Moore, who play various brass instruments. This had the potential to blossom into ambient-metal-jazz fusion. Yet they, too, remain placid throughout. Some will admire the way their restraint complements the comatose nature of O’Malley’s slow-motion strums. Other listeners might hanker for the accompanists to become less timid, less polite, less reverent. For them to do something that feels freer and more expressive. For them to say something with their instruments, as opposed to merely humming low in the mix. Presumably that’s not what they felt in the studio, or not what they were instructed to do by their illustrious leather-clad leader whose sole name and face dominates the cover. Perhaps half an hour isn’t enough time anyway for his collaborators to have ascended to jazzy emancipation in a manner that would’ve seemed at all natural at this tempo. Only in the final few minutes does their role become more assertively philharmonic. Alas this is of too little consequence, too late.
Given SUNN O)))’s propensity for overwhelming the senses, with volume and distortion and dry ice and an occasional Hungarian dressed as a tree and growling like a toad with wind, maybe the whole point of this recording was to not do that. To actively try to underwhelm instead? You can only push something so far to the extremes that, in the end, you have to back down, reverse, find another direction or a fresher kind of blend. Even so, it’s doubtful this was the best way to do it.
