Full Upon Her Burning Lips

For a band whose titling and artwork is so important for the images they conjure, reverting to a tighter focus works for them. Carlson's guitars, clearly the focus, get to step back from the angular and the lugubrious. Instead, red-lipped riffs flutter over careful and precise percussion, evoking crimson dresses striding down gold corridors. And underneath it all--the star player--Adrienne Davis’s steady, world-eating thud has never sounded better.

Full Upon Her Burning Lips is sumptuous, a return to basics informed by Earth's decade-and-a-half period of discovery. The album's impeccable balance of those poles places it among the band's finest recorded offerings.

10 songs that are the apotheosis of their spartan sound. [Jun 2019, p.95]

Full Upon Her Burning Lips is perhaps their most minimal effort yet--which is a big statement for a band defined by their monolithic minimalism--but the hypnotic spell these two put the listener under is remarkable.

This is Earth in their purest form. ... This album is also a perfect introduction to Earth for curious neophytes. [25 May 2019, p.55]

Forward motion makes So Full Upon Her Burning Lips more than just a return to a classic sound. There are enough surprises here that what could’ve been just a comfortable glance backward.

Earth governs the purpose for every note and drum hit to carry weight. You might not understand Full Upon Her Burning Lips the first time, but you might like it by the fifth time.

Taken in a single sitting, the rewards from this record are manifold. [Summer 2019, p.83]

Full Upon Her Burning Lips requires patience from the listener as its contemplative pace offers multiple rewards on repeat plays. There is a depth to the album which is more evident with an enhanced investment from the audience as layers are revealed in the aural panoramic panacea that are hidden within the subtext of the songs.

The narrower focus, combined with the decision to return to Seattle’s Studio Soli, raises the thought that Earth might have, at last, orbited back to the roaring wastelands of their early 1990s work. Jump into the longer cuts here, though, and you find something that sounds less like a trip on Tibetan quaaludes, more a slow chug of whisky. [Jun 2019, p.56]