Earth: the planet. The soil. The original name of Black Sabbath.Dylan Carlson chose wisely when he named his project nearly twenty years ago--it's a word that is simple yet evocative, rich yet ambiguous, full of portent and allusion. If it was a look backward to Tommy Iommi's tune-low-play-slow aesthetic, it was also a vision of that aesthetic pushed to its illogical extreme. And if the sound of Earth's original incarnation, with its towers of riffs and narcotic tempos, suggested the vastness of a planet and the sheer power of tectonic forces, the nature of it now is humbler and warmer, like the literal dirt beneath our feet.

The Bees Made Honey In The Lion's Skull is not a doom or drone album. Earth have not been a doom band since they returned to life with 2005's majestic, forlorn Hex; Or Printing in the Infernal Method, an album that lifted the 15 bpm, one-good-riff-is-enough approach from the older material, sold all the amps and blueprints to SunnO))), piled on organs, pianos, clean guitar playing, and filtered it all through a dustbowl-noir soundtrack. It's a sound that's sort of country, sort of post-rock, sort of what they used to be, and ultimately none of these things. It's this sound that returns on Bees--where once every nanosecond of space was filled with feedback, there are now chasms of sound in between each chord and each snare hit, little flourishes of free and creative playing can be found, and there's even space for (incredibly languid) solos. Earth have arrived at a sound so natural that it seems obvious, and yet there's really nothing else out here that sounds like them.

And even though this album, like last year's Hibernaculum, represents more of a refinement than a departure, it is nonetheless a progression. It's probably the best album of the neo-Earth sound. For the first time in Carlson's career, his project sounds like a full band, not just because it has multiple people playing, but because the players sound at home with one another--creating spaces for each instrument to be expressive, weaving amongst each other and playing off one another--it's almost like jazz, at 1 mile per hour.

But that misses the mark too--jazz has never had the single-minded devotion to the almighty riff that constitutes the beating heart of Earth's identity. On this point, Carlson has never wavered. Each song on Bees is a patient, careful exploration of the potentials and hidden spaces of a central riff. The songs don't differ much in texture, pacing, or structure, yet each riff is dynamic and rich enough to both sustain the song lengths (the shortest one is just under six minutes) and to differentiate itself from its peers. The standout moments for myself include the dark, aptly titled opener "Omens and Portents 1: The Driver," the quiet beauty of "Miami Morning Coming Down," the crashing, sublime piano on "Hung From the Moon," and the mature, nostalgic title track that closes out the album, but this album is a unified whole, and each listener will find his or her own favorite spaces to curl up and contemplate.

To be sure, it's an epic, ego-shattering activity to contemplate the void, the sheer size of the cosmos, and the unknowable vastness of time. And yet that same humility, that same sense of reverence, can be achieved by contemplating the local and the ordinary--the simple soil beneath us was once living matter, was once a mountain. Earth, I suspect, have realized this, and perhaps, like their name, their sound has contained these implications from the beginning. The biblical title of the album is a nod toward the profound simplicity of the mighty falling prey to decay and ruin, and thus birthing the new--the bones of the king of beasts become a home to something smaller and humbler.The Bees Made Honey In the Lion's Skull is a massive album without ever self-consciously trying to be massive; the simple fact of existence turns out to be revelation enough.

-Lucas Kane