Roberto: "Hey, you want to review the new Sunn O)))?"

Josh (internal monologue): "Guess so, yeah. But, Christ, do I really want another hour’s worth of doomdrone taking up shelf space? For that matter, do I really need another Sunn O))) album?"

Josh: "Sure, I suppose, why not?"

Roberto: "Full package, has a vellum slipcase."

Josh: "Yeah, I’ll take it!"

Sigh. The predilections of a record nerd are so damn predictable.

All to their credit, Sunn O))) have evolved from their inception as an Earth cover band, adding considerably to their sonic palette with the White albums and Black One upping the ante farther. Of course, at its core, the Sunn O))) sound is all about the drone, a low end rumble that shakes foundations and induces tectonic plates to shift under protest.

"Agartha" starts things off just as you’d expect, the first five of its seventeen minutes expelling massive waves of roiling downtuned notes... ultradoom on cough syrup. But then Attila Csihar drops by and lends some gravelly imprecations over those snail-crawl notes; a couple minutes later piano chords are struck and, by degrees, strings, horns and sounds from things that go bump in the night are added, each one stretching to infinity, individually and in a tangled merge, sounding like five or six Phill Niblock compositions playing concurrently.

That’s pretty much the template for the four tracks found on Monoliths & Dimensions, and it works to fairly astonishing effect. Any director with a half a brain should be beating down the doors of Messrs. Anderson and O’Malley to score their films, because this is some seriously cinematic and evocative stuff.

"Big Church" gets down to business from the onset, a female choir heralding the subterranean bass notes as Csihar provides obscure direction with tongue-twisting incantations as an army of guitars flits in and around it all, the collective sound ebbing and flowing until its abrupt conclusion.

What minimal light that managed to peek through the surface of "Big Church" is completely submerged under the tar of "Hunting & Gathering (Cydonia)." This time around, as Csihar grouses and grumbles, a "man choir" chimes in at regular intervals. Coupled with colossal squalls of trombone, trumpet and synth, you can imagine sitting on the sidelines witnessing the difficult birth of a demon or watching Godzilla beat the crap out of Tokyo for the umpteenth time.

The capper is album closer "Alice," lumbering into existence as a sunburnt and languorously bleeding refugee from one of Earth’s albums from the last few years, which you can either look at as ironic or wholly apropos. Either way, Monoliths and Dimension is an insidiously gorgeous piece of neo-western drift, the drones coated with a patina of prairie dust baking under a cloudless sky. Wind instruments get tangled in uneasy interplay with a string trio, each measure another unsteady step down a deserted main street, where a storm of bullets threatens to rain down from every open window and the prospect of legend or anonymity changes with every exhausted footfall. (7.5/10)