However what with this being Earth, Seattle's prime purveyors of the unabatingly doom-stricken, portent-laden instrumental, such human comfort never comes thus leaving the listener to wallow despairingly and occasionally wretchedly in a torturous quagmire of Lori Goldston's coarse cello scrapes and Karl Blau's deep-scarring bass incisions. However this is one sentimentally prickly and utterly viscid slough that's ultimately sadomasochistic to revel in, for supreme pleasure may be derived from squirming in the gallons of pain that you may discern – with a certain degree of unease – have gone into its conception. From the wearied folksy plod of His Teeth Did Brightly Shine to the hypnotic yet unnatural orchestration and crooked rhythmic skew of A Multiplicity of Doors, the experience engendered by arguably the finer of the two slithers of session is one of the gruesome distress of being encased in a hall of mirrors, stripped of liberty as you're left to inadvertently yet scrupulously survey your every blemish in the constant search for jagged-edged ending to the interminable horror of it all.
Then, around one third of the way into the debilitating, if laboriously concocted latter, as Carlson's fingers begin to slither forcefully over fretted string a lustrous gateway manifests itself and what sounds very much like homeless improvisation mutates into what sounds like irrefutable and indeed opulent majesty. For anyone never to have 'got' Earth this may quite conceivably be the moment when everything clicks into place, all grasped items and concepts are dropped, and shit is generally lost. The Corascene Dog scampers to a similarly intensifying sense of coherency, before attentions turn somewhat sensual on The Rakehell, a counfoundingly syncopated groove of a beast; a funked-up fiend that flutters to the leaden drone of Iron Butterfly. Of our many earthly pleasures the sounds emitted from these Seattleites remain rather foundational.
