“Earth will be up here as fast as they can,” he said.
Musically, Earth rarely does anything “fast.”
For fans, that’s part of the appeal.
“It’s music that you just feel through you,” sophomore Victor Holtz said before the show. “It’s music you feel more than you really listen to.”
Fifteen minutes after Holy Sons’ set ended, Dylan Carlson, Earth’s core songwriter and only constant member, pushed through the Bishop’s crowd.
Earth, a pioneer of the drone-doom genre, made a name for itself in the 1990s, playing loud music at crawling tempos, influencing dark, heavy bands like Sunn O))).
The band went on hiatus in 1996 and reformed in 2002, with its output since reducing distortion and adding elements of blues, jazz and Americana but keeping the low tempos.
The audience stretched from the stage to the back of the room, next to the merchandise table, marked by a glowing multi-colored sign, where fans had started buying Earth T-shirts long before the music began.
The audience ranged in age from college students to middle-aged men and women, dressed in shirts representing bands from Pink Floyd to Cloud Rat.
Dusty Uebelhor, a 25-year-old in a Black Sabbath shirt, made the 1 1/2-hour trip from Jasper, Indiana, where he lives.
He said a friend who lives in Louisville, Kentucky, told him he had to see Earth if he got the chance. And, anyway, he connects to the slow, heavy music they play, he said.
“People are like, ‘How can you listen to it?’” Uebelhor said. “ ... There’s something about it that’s so soothing, even though it’s considered ‘doom metal.’”
Uebelhor was seeing Earth for the first time, and the Seattle-based band was playing its premier show in Bloomington.
Carlson, clad in a red-and-black flannel shirt, announced that to the crowd as the house music faded to make way for distorted guitars.
Thirty-five minutes after the end of Holy Sons’ set, Earth finally took the stage with “There is a Serpent Coming,” an eight-minute cut from last year’s “Primitive and Deadly,” the band’s eighth full-length album.
Carlson often turned from the crowd to face drummer Adrienne Davies, locking in guitar chords and cymbal crashes with precision. Davies moved wave-like, throwing her whole body into quarter-note drum hits.
Carlson played the guitar slowly, tilting the neck of his guitar vertically, his long hair covering his face.
Later in the set, he opened the front of his shirt, revealing a chest tattoo.
All the while, the crowd watched, transfixed while the band played, only applauding at the end of a song. Some crowd members nodded their heads in time to the music, but most just looked straight forward at the band.
There was one exception.
Midway through the one-two punch of “Badgers Bane” and “Even Hell has its Heroes” — which Carlson dedicated to Indiana-born author Kurt Vonnegut — Carlson hit a chord, raised his picking hand and formed his fingers in the shape of the devil’s horns.
At that moment, most of the hands in the crowd followed suit, and the audience roared.
