Devotional (feat. Petra Haden)

Like the static, infinitely heavy work of his principal band, sunn O))), the collaboration between guitarist Greg Anderson (aka The Lord) and violinist/singer Petra Haden is a kind of mood music: it doesn’t take up space so much as take up time and doesn’t direct your experience so much as shape it. And as visceral as Anderson’s walls of distortion are, the music is driven by Haden’s chants, which, in a twist of drone-metal’s occasional Eurocentrism, often sound like Persian or Indian music. And like the great occult-oriented horror movies the album feels rooted in, you sense that for all their seriousness, they’re having fun with it: see the title of the album’s nearly 12-minute centerpiece, “What Lies Behind Us Lies Buried Because It Is Dead.”