Reviews list for OM - Conference of the Birds (2006)

I first encountered US duo OM (a side-project of legendary stoner metal trio Sleep) back in 2013 through their very solid 2009 fourth album “God Is Good” & immediately picked up a ticket to their show at the Annandale Hotel in Sydney which ended up being of a similarly high quality. Their bottom-heavy brand of psychedelic stoner metal really hit my sweet spot & I found the lack of any guitars (other than the bass variety) to be intriguing. The vocals of Al Cisneros were probably the limiter when it came to how far OM could travel within my musical stratosphere as they probably weren’t any more than serviceable but instrumentally these guys comfortably exceeded their meagre numbers. Strangely OM seemed to drift off my radar from there & I’ve only really gotten around to giving them a bit more of my attention now, a full decade later & this time with their 2006 sophomore album “Conference of the Birds”.

“Conference of the Birds” is comprised of just the two epic tracks; a sixteen-minute atmospheric psychedelic rock number called “At Giza” (which reminds me a lot of The Doors up until the last two & a half minutes when it takes off into crushing stoner doom territory) & an even more gargantuan seventeen-minute stoner metal monster in “Flight of the Eagle”. The former took some time to fully dig its teeth in but eventually became an engaging trip through a retrospective sound that has always appealed to me, capped off with a suitably immense crescendo that seemed unlikely halfway into the track. The latter had a more immediate impact due its more consistent focus on slumbering doom riffs of the highest order & should satisfy anyone with more than a passing interest in the stoner metal genre. I love the way Al works his ever-moving basslines into the pieces, in the process filling out the space that would usually be smothered with guitars. His tone during the heavier sections is filthy & I'd imagine that a lot of unsuspecting listeners may assume that they're hearing some seriously down-tuned guitars anyway. Let's just say that OM make one hell of a racket for a duo.

As with “God Is Good”, “Conference of the Birds” is another very high quality release that possesses both weight & substance but those vocals are again the reason that I’m not tempted to even take a casual glance above that 4/5 region. Let’s not let that distract us from the positives here though as I doubt OM have it in them to produce anything that’s significantly below par. I’d suggest that this release will likely offer plenty of appeal to someone like Sonny.