G&P Review: The Sun Through a Telescope

The Sun Through a Telescope
Green/Black and Orange
Dwyer Records
As another wise bunch of Canucks once observed, Inertia Kills, and that’s the pitfall that awaits many a drone doom band. To the uninitiated, busting out languorous washes of over-amped feedback sounds as though it would be the sonic equivalent of Jackson Pollock’s splatterpieces: something your six year old could whip out over a rainy weekend between temper tantrums. Anyone who has ever tried to make minimal music compelling will quickly disabuse you of that notion.
Ottawa’s one man drone-monger The Sun Through a Telescope often wallows over the germ of a great hook or riff or vocal approach over the course of nine songs divided into two EPs (available as a single cassette) Unfortunately, too often the songs fall victim to inertia, the good parts get repeated until they lose their potency. But the germ is there. Like Disembowelment before him, The Sun Through a Telescope likes to mix up the drifting doom currents with blast beats and splinters of Jesu ambience on songs like “They Used to Worship the Svn.” The spectral, reverbed, hellish and occasionally roboticized vocals are generally very effective at evoking the retro-digital-pastoral-pagan ambition of the songs and show a keen ear for atmosphere. I think the largest challenge for The Sun Through a Telescope lies in being a solo project. Sunn O))) and Earth wrote effective drone jams that succeeded because of the interplay between the multiple instruments. Here, it’s largely just one guitar with maybe some electronic ambiance. Check out Orange here or Green/Black here.

[Full disclosure: The band sent me a download.]