Believe it or not, there are other places than Metal Insider to read about your favorite heavy bands. Until today, ESPN.com wasn’t one of them.
An astute reader noticed a post by writer and former NBA forward Paul Shirley on ESPN all about Sunn O))). Shirley, a writer that reminds us of Chuck Klosterman (who is referenced in the article), spends a portion of the article speaking about how intelligent a band has to be to play heavy music, saying the arrangements are too complicated to play anything less. His interview with the band’s Stephen O’Malley proves it, he states. After the interview, he sees the band play:
[O’Malley] said one of the band’s goals is to be able to bring the audience an experience that allows them to turn off the outside world. That night, Sunn succeeded in its goal. The band took the stage in a fog of green smoke that completely concealed them. Once ensconced in front of the now-invisible stacks of amplifiers, the band started in on a bowel-loosening guitar introduction that lasted 20 minutes. Thanks to my cursory research, I was ready for loud. But there was no real way to be prepared for what I was hearing. My entire body vibrated in time to the waves of sound as they washed over me. The hair on my arms stood up. My industrial-strength ear plugs did what they could, but my eustachian tubes started to feel strange after only 15 minutes.
O’Malley told Shirley that the show would be “like a massage,” the scribe found it more like “a 16-hour version of the SAT.” We think he still liked it though. While his vivid description of the show might not convince readers whose listening tastes run more to “Jock Jams: Volume 2,” to run out and pick up Monoliths & Dimensions, it’s great to see such a non-commercial and heavy band getting mainstream press.
