Pitchfork

The powerhouse Detroit-based trio Paik emerged out of Michigan's fertile space-rock movement of the late 1990s, with their stormy, high-density drones providing a crucial negative-plate balance to the more celestial ambient tremors of acts like Windy and Carl. Over the course of four subsequent full-length albums, Paik have generated a surprisingly graceful and nuanced river of sludge, patiently carving its own steep-sided black canyon through the group's desolate Rust Belt precincts. And the curious, seductive pull of Paik's artificial gravity has never been more acute than it is on their fifth album Monster of the Absolute. Forcefully compacting their murky instrumental riffs into a thickened, implosive mass, the three members of Paik are nevertheless able to supply the centrifugal force necessary to keep their thunderous creations aloft and spinning in continuous diabolical orbit.

Compared to the decayed sprawl of 2004's Satin Black, the seven-track Monster of the Absolute is a model of precision. Though undeniably heavy, Paik draws only tangentially from traditional metal. Their gradual, surging currents can dovetail nicely with some of the more shoegazerly moments of Boris or Jesu, but more often the trio advances with a uniquely limber, propulsive symmetry. Here it falls on the rhythm section of drummer Ryan Pritts and bassist Ali Cregg to do the brunt of the load-bearing structural work, freeing guitarist Rob Smith to add insoluble layers of droning feedback and fine-toothed psychedelic detail.

It's Cregg who also provides the album with much of its essential melodic and dramatic momentum, as on the turbulent "Phantoms", a track whose churning, bottom-heavy distortion recalls the post-grunge pummel of such long-gone AmRep trios as Hammerhead or Vertigo. Likewise, the introspective "Contessa" rides Cregg's stalwart bass through a boundless sea of massed overtones, with Smith's fractal guitar drones expanding ever-outward into the unlit marsh. More conventional are "October" or the spiraling "Snakeface", which trace the elegant trajectories of Mogwai or Explosions in the Sky. Guided by Pritt's restless, inventive drumming, the music never succumbs to reductive post-rock crescendoes, but rather voicing each of their hypnotic repetitions around a central organic, breath-like pulse.

The longest piece on Monster of the Absolute is its nine-minute title track, a prolonged narcotic drip of cascading guitar, strummed bass, and fluttering percussion that sounds as though it would need to be broadcast through skyscraper-sized amplifiers to achieve its full levitational effect. Bracketing the album are a pair of brief, percussion-less drones ("Intro" and "Outro") that seem intended to speed the listener's transition into Paik's immersive soundscapes. While all of its pieces share a certain thudding abstraction, Monster of the Absolute features a marked lack of genuine tooth-gritting dissonance. There seems instead to be unexpected, enveloping warmth that emanates from the album's shadows, inviting the listener to spend a perhaps unhealthy length of time beneath Paik's dark, choppy waters.