Where GOD IS GOOD was the first step in a more ornate and sophisticated direction for OM, ADVAITIC SONGS achieves a level of composition that would’ve been impossible to foresee. There remains the singularity of purpose that is the core of all OM records, but no single reason can account for this comprehensive nature of their evolution. On this album the core primary sound of OM remains, yet everything reaches further and becomes more of itself. Whatever drone-doom camp that OM had previously been placed in has been decimated by the sheer imagination and expansive quality of this recording. For a band that has continually followed its own course, and stood alone in its sound and approach, ADVAITIC SONGS for certain, is the band’s most focused, progressive document.

In metal and punk, there’s a shorthand for describing bands who model their sound on known genre benchmarks — if a band sounds like pre-Heartwork Carcass, you can call them “Carcass worship” and plenty of people will know what you mean. Bands who use the famous Discharge beat play d-beat, though “Discharge worship” is a style in its own right. And so on. I became interested in Pittsburgh’s Zombi when I heard them described as a Goblin worship band. There’s more to it than that, of course, but I want to start there, because Goblin’s soundtracks for Romero and Argento movies hold a permanent place in my heart. In the early 2000’s, there weren’t many bands writing lost-giallo-soundtrack music — there are more now — and Zombi’s pastiche approach to composition fascinated me. Their Relapse Records debut, Cosmos, came charging out of the gate with its central influence on its sleeve, unmistakable to the already-initiated. No horror fiend could hear it without experiencing a profoundly dislocating sense of having been here before — but not here, exactly: rather, somewhere like here. That’s the spindle around which Steve Moore & Anthony Paterra have, over the past twenty years, wound threads of near-infinite variety. To describe what their work feels when you hear it requires us to venture a little out into the theoretical weeds.