Earth's second Sun

Back in the early 1990s, Earth was a three piece based in Olympia, Washington, ground zero for the grunge movement. Although, despite the fact that they were signed to its championing label, Sub Pop, and Earth's founding member Dylan Carlson had a roommate named Kurt Cobain, there was nothing grunge about the group.

Earth 2, the band's seminal album from this period, consists of three epic compositions – varying between 15 and 30 minutes long - that feature heavily distorted guitar drones, slow, doom-laden repeating riffs, and howling feedback. There are no vocals or drums; it's an incredibly dark and heavy landscape that inspired a legion of bands including Sunn O))) (who in fact formed as a tribute to Earth, naming themselves after Carlson's amplifier of choice) and Boris.

By the late 90s, the band disappeared in the tumult of Carlson's problems with drugs. Speaking of the group's return Carlson says, "I consider myself very lucky … most people don't vanish for a few years and have anyone give a shit when they show back up."

Carlson isn't a man to give up easily; after his long break from the musical world he devoted himself to improvement. "When I started Earth I had a definite idea of what I wanted do to," he says, "So most of the music flowed from that. When I took my hiatus I went for a while where I wasn't playing guitar at all for a few years, and then when I got back into it, I tried to make up for lost time and threw myself into practice and learn as much as possible."

Over half a decade after abandoning music, Carlson reformed the group and released Hex: Or Printing in the Infernal Method and Hibernaculum, an album of older material revisited through the prism of Hex. These albums eschew the drones and distortion of the band's earlier incarnation and replace them with cleaner country-tinged guitars whose beautifully sombre melodies create vast open spaces that are miles away from Earth 2.

Listening to the steady drones and waves of feedback of Earth's early material, it's difficult to imagine the fragile beauty of their new music. However, this variability makes a bit more sense when Carlson lists off some of his favorite guitarists: "Tony Iommi, Bill Frisell, Jerry Reed, Steve Cropper, Cornell Dupree, Roy Buchanan, Jerry Garcia, John Cipollina, John Lee Hooker, Carlos Santana, there's a lot of guitar players… I try to approach the instrument with a lot of humility," he says.

One of the members of that list, jazz guitar legend Bill Frisell, guests on Earth's new album The Bees Made Honey in the Lion's Skull. "He really added to the songs, it didn't turn into 'here's the two minutes of the song, now take it away!' And the other guitarist shows off for 10 minutes."

With its focus on the melody and dynamics of the band's post-millennial phase combined with the primal rock of 90's Earth, The Bees Made Honey in the Lions Skull could be the best thing the band has ever done. According to Carlson, "musically, it's kind of different, where Hex was created out of opposition to my previous work, by not using distortion and these other restrictive guidelines I placed on myself. With this album, the music came first and was created in more of a band environment… there's definitely some raaar guitar tones and a little grit. It's not super clean like Hex was. It's a mixture of cool guitar tones."

Earth may have been at risk of becoming another obscure footnote in music history, but in 2008 they are as inspired and vital a creative force as ever.