Satin Black

Is Paik's fourth album supreme sonic sludge, or just supremely sludgy? That might depend on your taste for grim, power-trio instrumental drone rock that mixes metal, psychedelia, and noise, but certainly never tries to be feel-good. With five extended pieces running to nearly an hour's playing time, there's little if any compromise in their morass of sound. The dirge-like beats (and sometimes no beat at all) anchor layers of grimy distorted guitars, buzzing whines, overlapping and infinitely decaying sustains, and a bottom so black and solid it seems to have oozed from the deepest of coal mines. It's the kind of stuff you'll either want to crank to the max so as to obliterate all other sensory stimuli, or lower to the threshold of audibility in order to be able to even tolerate it. (And even set at a moderate volume, the density of the cross-fire is enough to set your ears a-ringing by the time the disc finishes.) The spaceship-caught-in-a-windstorm-of-guitar-frenzy ambience does get wearying, with only occasional hints of more conventional rock riffs to grab less avant-inclined listeners' attention, like the march-of-doom progression near the beginning of "Dizzy Stairs."