Pitchfork

How much smaller will the world become? Technology's sporadic cycle has taken us now from foot to sea to wires to air to wireless, so that what I'm typing this instant could be read by someone in many of the world's countries the next. Whatever it is you want, your computer can probably give it to you right now. With that progression, our attention span has regressed dramatically: We text as we eat, watch funny videos as we lounge, and use the internet as the television blares. With music, shuffling and skipping have compromised the most fundamental units of consumption, the album and the song. In several interviews for last year's Songs in A&E, Jason Pierce-- who's explored hour-long drones in Spacemen 3 and escalating ecstasy in Spiritualized-- said, "People aren't taking albums. They're taking tracks. I'm waiting for when they just want the chorus." He wondered if people will only need the notes-- the A and the E-- soon enough. Maybe he's onto something: In a world where anything can be here any second, will we want something that takes any longer?

It's a bit too convenient to reduce Pantheon of the Lesser-- the monolithic sophomore album from Portland, Maine's long-and-heavy metal quartet Ocean-- into an act of defiance to this speeding, shrinking world. But the 36- and 23-minute tracks that comprise Pantheon do feel a bit like revolt. They crawl through big riffs, rewarding the attentive with method and nuance, an achievement that recalls the subtle payoffs of classical composers Arvo Pärt and Philip Glass. Expectations and options become exits and entrances, trapdoors that allow the band to keep its familiar guitar-drum-bass space churning and fresh. For this, Ocean never feels selfish or ungrateful with its audience's time. And the payoffs? Imagine the climax of your favorite post-rock explosion lasting longer and gilded with the heavy elements and themes of desperation. Indeed, among the relatively crowded field of viscous, torpid metal (doom, drone, sludge or otherwise), Pantheon of the Lesser feels like a new benchmark.

Check opener "The Beacon": A colossal drum hit blows the album open, only to be trailed by a slow riff that fingers through scrims of its own feedback note by note. The drums keep coming, directing the action and scattering the riffs like cannonballs, everything marching in unison alongside vocalist Candy's subterranean, super-serrated growls. The track moves in and out of that mold until it all collapses, leaving only a martial drumbeat above washes of feedback. And just when the climax hits, the band breaks into a sublime haze of guitar glow and drum decay. "Of the Lesser," the second and final track, opens like "The Beacon" in reverse, a minute of silence punctuated by lonely guitar chords that hover in the air. The familiar march begins, but this time, the guitars pull away from the beat, lunging back from its forward progress. The guitars eventually charge ahead, and the drums even race into a double-time pound.

During the first half of Pantheon and most of 2005's Here Where Nothing Grows, Ocean often alluded to one central riff, a low-slung chord progression that's always been stunted or subverted at the last second. But about 16 minutes into "Of the Lesser", they launch directly into it, stating it and repeating it three times. They begin the riff again, but sustain one note, returning to march formation. After those riffs, the last six minutes become but a blissful afterglow. "Salt", the second track from Here Where Nothing Grows, was an exercise in writing into and out of that riff; much of that album's third track, "The Fall", employed the same maneuvers. Pantheon, then, is an arrival, delivering on a three-year-old promise. That's a long time to wait for a riff to be resolved, but-- no hyperbole intended-- it's made every bad MP3 shuffle or bland slow-metal album I've heard since Here Where Nothing Grows worth it.