Pitchfork

Earth's "Miami Morning Coming Down II (Shine)" is a steady, sedate, chiming march, a primary-colored burst of guitars, organs, drums. For a man whose scuzzy, Melvins-mainlined Earth 2 remains the document for drone-and doom-minded depressives-- some of whom actually named their bands after Earth songs/guitar equipment-- Dylan Carlson's return as the Ennio Morricone of metal continues to confound. The band that borrowed their name from Sabbath's earliest, nuclear-paranoid incarnation have become optimists, purveyors of uplift. Where Earth once pounded chords flat, the newly reconfigured quartet pulls them out like taffy. "Miami Morning Coming Down" nods at Johnny Cash, spaghetti twang, gospel hymns; even Carlson's newest title, The Bees Made Honey in the Lion's Skull, turns his band's fearsome reputation inside out, offering up metal's ubiquitous skull as the birthplace of something sweet.

Earth's hiatus, from 1996 to 2002, turned Carlson into a cult figure, and his return was fretted about by the acolytes he'd picked up while he was gone. Sunn0))), Boris, and Sleep had turned Carlson's sound into a movement-- a slow one, to be sure-- waiting eagerly for his return. Perversely, he came back with 2005's Hex, or Printing in the Infernal Method instead, a demoniacally glacial deconstruction of the post-rock twang that had abounded in his absence. Hex was heavy in the sense that it kept time even as Carlson meandered and detoured and wandered through melodic progressions so spaced out they sounded like jazz; one thing it definitely wasn't was Sunn0))).

Carlson's concept for Bees was even more abstract. "After we did Hex, we thought, 'Let's do a kind of gospel record,'" Carlson told Pitchfork last year. Perhaps Carlson just meant strength in numbers: Bees is probably the most band-oriented thing Carlson's ever done, as much about drummer Adrienne Davies and organist Steve Moore as Carlson's guitar lines, which for the first time were added not first but last. The result is an imperceptible relay between keys, guitars, bass, and drums, with any given melodic line handed off three or four times in the course of a song. Over time, the parts stay the same, the instruments change, and time slows down-- after a while, the songs shrink down to exact moments, static pictures that morph so gradually you never spot the change.

Still, Bees is the biggest, cleanest, and most flagrantly melodic record Earth's ever recorded. "Omens and Portents I: The Driver" has the kind of mildly ominous, lazily distorted tone that soaks Beach House records, while "Omens and Portents II: Carrion Crow" offers up the exact same five-note ascending harmony as the Microphones' "I Love it So Much!" It's left to Davies to provide the weight: "I've always noticed that it's hard to get your playing down towards where your heartbeat is... It's all about keeping your heartbeat down, for me," she told Pitchfork. Carlson's always played slow, but six years of playing with Davies (and touring with bassist Don McGreevy) has given every Earth improv the same massive feel of doomy inevitability. Even as Carlson opens up, and looks up, Davies keeps his compositions anchored to the ground.

But what melodies. "Engine of Ruin" deadpans a kind of flat keyboard line which Carlson expands, alternately following along and filling in, stalking down every harmonic permutation. "Miami Morning Coming Down" has probably Carlson's purest and most ravishing pattern ever, a trebly rise and fall that triggers nostalgia, sunrise, sunset, panic, elation, resignation. For a heavy record, Bees spends a lot of time just staring into space, thinking.

When Earth started, in 1990, it was an oddball project among friends; Carlson was better known for being pals with an aspiring musician named Kurt Cobain than he was for being one in his own right. In a way, Bees feels as quixotic as anything he was doing then: where once he spent his days stripping down Sabbath to a single ringing chord, now he's stripping chords for parts. Amazingly, the results are just as huge. Who knew you could do so much so slowly?