The Tyranny of Tradition

Ambient, drone, doom, experimental, black, minimalist, noise, power ambient, musique concrete, trancecore, avant-garde, post metal band Sunn O))) is back in the studio working on a new genre defining record that may be in stores as early as July.  The record, which will be called “The Crucifixion of Plants”, will be released as a triple vinyl LP that can only be played on Teflon coated record players that were made in Myanmar between the years 1986 and 1989.

In spite of a massive amount of pre-order requests, the band has insisted that there will only be 12 copies printed.  Ten of the copies will be hidden in random Chili’s restaurant kitchens throughout North America.  One special copy of the album will be buried in the chest cavity of a cadaver at a morgue somewhere in Northern Kansas.  The final copy will be cryogenically frozen until the year 2052, when it will be launched into outer space inside the corpse of a humpback whale.  Many fans of the band believe this could be their most accessible record.

Band members Stephen O’Malley and Greg Anderson have not given many details about the album, but the ones that have been released sound very promising.  The first track called “Trgh5ueh7slyVuhQ(){“ will be a recording of a man eating and digesting a pound of fire ants.   Track number 2, the magnificently named “Fierce Glruh99rf”, will feature 12 chainsaws being thrown off of the Eiffel Tower mixed with hundreds of garage doors opening and closing underwater.

Some of the other album highlights include a 12-minute recording of a turkey pot pie being heated up in a microwave, a song where 500 kindergarteners try to tune guitars while wearing fake 3 foot long FloJo press on nails on each finger and a twelve second long cover of Jethro Tull’s “Thick As A Brick” played by a chimpanzee hitting a tin can against a wall.

Despite the fact that no one outside of the band has heard the record, Spin Magazine critic Andy Lafontaine has already called it “The Best Metal Album of 2015”.   “You don’t need to listen to a Sunn O))) album to understand its significance,” wrote Lafontaine in his recent review of the record, “All you need to know is that this is the sort of thing that you can have on your shelf and get mad respect from people at parties who think it makes you look edgy and misunderstood.”

(Editors Note:  I really dig Sunn O))), but if I have to read another hipster reviewer write about how one of their albums is more significant than the Russian Revolution while ignoring 99 percent of metal music in their publication I think I’m going to stick a fork in my eye)