More than a decade after its initial release, Om's Advaitic Songs continues to stand as a towering achievement in heavy music's ongoing evolution - a record that demolished preconceptions about what drone-doom could become while establishing new possibilities for consciousness-expanding composition. Now, Drag City presents a 2025 repress of this essential double LP, offering contemporary listeners the opportunity to experience one of the most focused and progressive documents in Om's remarkable catalog. Where God Is Good represented the first step in a more ornate and sophisticated direction for Om, Advaitic Songs achieved a level of composition that would have been impossible to foresee from the duo's earlier, more strictly ritualistic works. The album maintains the singularity of purpose that forms the core of all Om records, yet no single reason can account for the comprehensive nature of their evolution captured here.
The transformation is immediately apparent: while the core primary sound of Om remains unmistakably present, everything reaches further and becomes more of itself. Whatever drone-doom camp that Om had previously been placed in was decimated by the sheer imagination and expansive quality of this recording. For a band that had continually followed its own course and stood alone in its sound and approach, Advaitic Songs emerged as their most ambitious statement yet. The album's title references the non-dualistic philosophy of Advaita Vedanta, and this spiritual framework permeates every aspect of the compositions. These are not simply heavy riffs extended into mantric repetition, but carefully constructed sonic architectures designed to facilitate transcendental experience. The interplay between Al Cisneros' hypnotic bass meditations and Emil Amos' rhythmic foundation creates spaces vast enough for consciousness to expand and explore.
What makes this 2025 repress particularly significant is its preservation of the album's original double LP format, allowing the compositions to breathe across four full sides of vinyl. The extended running times and careful sequencing reveal themselves as essential to the album's impact - this is music that requires space and time to achieve its full transformative potential.
The production captures Om at their most refined, each element precisely placed within expansive sonic landscapes that manage to feel both intimate and cosmic. The duo's mastery of dynamics and space creates compositions that can shift from whispered contemplation to crushing revelation within the span of a single breath, yet every transition feels organic and inevitable.
