The long-awaited new album from seminal drone heavies Earth opens with something akin to a spaghetti western fugue, massive and stretched out, spacey and spacious, a druggy western/post-rock dirge that's dreamy but desolate, ominous and shuffling, a deeply mesmerizing meditation of simple,spare drumming and heavily reverbed, heavy but not "metal", guitars (including lapsteel), all unfolding into a haunted ghost town lament and twangy desert post-rock. Very beautiful and slow and mysterious, like Codeine and Calexico, Low and Sixteen Horsepower, a western Mazzy Star or Godspeed You Black Emporer , that sort of clean, undistorted-but-heavy, emotionally heavy, combined with Ennio Morricone style invocations.

Uncoiling melodies dissipate across darkened crimson skies, and mighty swells of instrumental gloom shake under the dust of ages. Listening to this conjures images of scorpions resting on sun baked rocks, of tumbleweeds and rusted out cars, rural decay and wide open skies as far as the eye can see. A whole new type of heavy, droning Americana. Fans of Earth's earlier, heavier drone metal may be baffled by Hex, but for those of us who are just as much in love with Earth's Thrones and Dominions and Pentastar: In The Style Of Demons albums, where Dylan Carlson and company began charting more melodic, post-rock/psychedelic waters, this feels like a natural evolution, a breathtaking new chapter in Earth's storied career, and is just as heavy as anything that has come before. Highly recommended.