Conference of the Birds, by OM. Holy Mountain Records, 2006.

The contemporary popular music scene is like a children’s splash park, where consumers try to cool down without getting soaked. The point is to avoid commitment. The last thing an iPod owner addicted to the play of randomness wants is a song that demands too much time and space. From that perspective, OM’s second album Conference of the Birds is perversely anachronistic. Although clocking in at only a little over a half hour, like LPs did in the 1960s, the record consists of just two fifteen minute-plus tracks. Slow to build, deliberately repetitive, and lacking in the peaks and valleys, which made the classic rock mini-operas of bands like The Beatles, The Who, and Genesis easier to sit through, “At Giza” and “Flight of the Eagle” reject the casual listener with glass-eyed disdain. If you want to derive any pleasure from these songs, you have to give yourself over to them, suspending the shuffle-mode self in favor of single-minded devotion. This is music that demands full immersion.

OM’s principals, singer and bassist Al Cisneros and drummer Chris Hakius, used to be members of the highly regarded San Jose metal band Sleep, whose music was described as “stoner rock.” Conference of the Birds treads a similar path. But the journey OM invites you to take requires something deeper than drugs. Their lyrics are loopy, yet suffused with a gravity that makes them resistant to the charge of postmodern irony. Although lines like, “grant to me—a light to see—and pilgrimage to mountain of the votaric form,” don’t make obvious sense, they demonstrate that “At Giza” is about something more than the impossibility of seriousness. OM’s retro New Age vibe may be allegorical, but its message is still clear: listen like your life depended on it.