Sun bleached stones lie about the earth like bones licked clean by the scouring wind. The immeasurable movement of the day into night is the pace here, where the brutish life of man is manifest in the landscape – the crawl of the cloud’s shadow across the earth, the cold howl of the scavengers behind the mountains, the land bare and empty. Earth are perhaps the only band capable of creating an honest and evocative soundtrack to a novel by the great Cormac McCarthy – and here they have chosen his monolithic masterpiece of brutality, Blood Meridian, as their muse. Each piece on Hex moves with the portentous weight of the group of ragged scalpers who haunt the Mexican border in the novel. The desert wind is audible in the immense space between each crashing note of Dylan Carlson’s guitar. The hollow pound of the snare is the echo in a valley where the sky is unblemished but for the wheeling shapes of gnarled vultures. Banjos creak and wheeze like a sick laugh from a toothless grin. The entire band moves as one lumbering giant and we are driven before it. This is a kind of gnostic southern rock, played at the slowest possible tempo – setting out to achieve nothing less that pure transcendence and to transport you to a mythical America of accursed desolation and creeping wrath. Hex is a record of such magnificent power that it seems capable of brewing storms – it is Earth’s masterpiece and one of the greatest odes to literature that rock has ever produced.
Raiford (The Felon Wind):
The Kite 
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