Om’s music strikes a deeply spiritual chord with me. Not that their lyrics make any more sense to me than they do to anyone else, and I don’t care if Al Cisneros is Christian – smudged Jesus prison tattoo, a mumbled “God bless you all” to the audience before the last song: To me, Om’s songs are pagan hymns to nature. It’s all about mountains, obviously, and it was on wandering around in Mt. Etna’s dead, black moonscape, where nothing green can grow and nothing lives except the volcano itself, humming “On the Mountain at Dawn” to myself while kicking the lava dust, that I realized how much I like this band.

Om’s appearance on Roadburn ’07 was marked by bad sound for most of us, since then Chris Hakius has left the duo and been replaced by Grails’ Emil Amos, so that’s what everyone’s talking about tonight: Can he fill out the role? People talk about him and Al not having the same rapport Al and Chris had, I don’t hear that, really. What I do hear is that even though Emil puts in plenty of fills and syncopated rhythms, his playing isn’t that awe inspiring, it’s not that fresh. It’s fine, it does the job, but it’s nothing that makes your jaw drop. That said, tonight’s show, the last on the tour, is pure magic to me. I could bitch about the sound, of course I could, it doesn’t get good before Al turns up his amp a notch just before the last song, then it explodes; but honestly, I’m a trance the whole show. As I had hoped.

Aron is a local psych folk singer that I haven’t checked out because I’m lazy, so I’m taken aback by his Satanic psych rock set with the world’s smallest drum kit and Aron himself looking like a 90’s Boyd Rice. According to what I’m told, he plays a different kind of set each time, so I’ll probably have to check him out again. And again.

Photo: Mette Huus Christensen