EARTH

“Primitive and Deadly”

(Southern Lord)

YOB

“Clearing the Path to Ascend”

(Neurot)

Earth and Yob are both trios from the Pacific Northwest led by middle-aged men with some kind of attachment to the riffs and textures of early metal, a preference for slow tempos and some implicit understanding of songs as life-forms, with all the action at the deep center.

Which is to say that sometimes in Earth’s “Primitive and Deadly” and Yob’s “Clearing the Path to Ascend” — most times, really — the beginning and the end are phases of warming up and warming down, while the middles are rich and complicated. And so, the listening experience is always a gradual procedure, never everything at once. You approach, you engage, you get down to the good stuff, you withdraw. You almost want to shake hands with each record after you’re done.

Image “Primitive and Deadly” by Earth.

Earth, from Seattle, is the more stubbornly slow and droning band — its drummer, Adrienne Davies, often sounds as if she’s picking up and restarting in the middle of a bar — and a bit broader in its range of suggestion. Led by Dylan Carlson for 25 years as a mostly instrumental trio, Earth became a mellower operation after 2000. It had already followed hard rock back to root causes, but it started letting in blues or country or folk or ambient elements, sometimes adding a cello or a piano or the jazz guitarist Bill Frisell, sounding like a cross between Neil Young with Crazy Horse and Miles Davis’s “In A Silent Way.”