Album Review: Om - Advaitic Songs

Is devotional doom a genre? Can metal and Sufism coexist in the same work? Is it possible to achieve enlightenment through drones and elongated bass riffs? We're always talking of transcendence in music, in achieving some kind of ecstatic nirvana, and Om wear their spiritualism on their sleeves. It's in their profoundly religious iconography; song titles such as Sinai; and lyrics dripping with ritualistic religious speak, referencing the Red Sea, faquirs and astral flight.

All these allusions alter your approach to their music. Church music is greeted with a kind of rapt devotional attention, and it's hard not to at least initially put Om's music on a pedestal, above all those who sing about cars, girls and imbibing chemicals. It's very clear this music is shooting for a higher plane. Though where this is, and which spiritual escalator they're on, is far from clear.

Om were born from the ashes of Sleep, a bunch of stoner doomers with a penchant for very long songs, though five albums down the track they've moved well beyond the doom or sludge moniker. In fact, the traces of metal are rapidly disappearing, and we're left with an almost neo-classical, quasi-exotic deconstruction of the genre. Opener Addis features a female vocalist singing Hindi; tabla kicks in and though it's heavy as hell with bass and drums, it's also sparse, allowing plenty of space for mournful strings.

They do get heavy and doomy, however, with impossibly detuned thick, heavy almost funky bass, metronomic percussion, violin, cello, viola, flute and the aforementioned table, as well as a touch of nasty vocals. But it feels like so much more, particularly when they escape the heavy riffage of their past, create something new and transcend.