The three middle tracks hew a little closer to genre expectations. "State of Non-Return," even has a growling guitar line. The drums are mixed high enough to gesture at doom's trudging groove, and Al Cisneros vocals have the rough edge and clipped phrasing of a waaaaay mellower Ozzie. All of this, though, serves less to solidify the band's bona fides, and more to emphasize how eager-to-please the album is, as every touch of metal past dissipates into Orientalist squiggling. It's like the band sat down and said, "How can we stay just metal enough to still be metal, and yet be family-friendly enough to get coverage on NPR?" Or, for that matter, in the Atlantic?

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This, then, should be the moment where I fulminate against the bland tyranny of the mainstream and damn all false metal to be devoured by Demogorgon, Orcus, and other malevolent entities I discovered through a youth misspent playing Dungeons and Dragons.

The only problem is that, as someone who listens to a fair bit of metal, I am forced to admit that Om isn't really all that unusual. Death metal, like Autopsy or Deicide, really is bizarrely brutal—one of the least-accessible forms of high-decibel torture ever to try to pass itself off as popular music. But once you move into other extreme metal subgenres, like black and doom, you face an uncomfortable truth. A lot of this music isn't exactly aggressive or off-putting. Instead, it's ... kind of pleasant. Soothing, even.

Ukranian black-metal horde Drudkh, for example, may ideologically flirt with quasi-fascist nationalism, but musically they're no more offensive than My Bloody Valentine or Sigur Ros. Drudkh is loud, certainly. But its loudness is lyrical and sweeping—less remorseless assault than transcendent sublime. Drudkh's 2012 album Eternal Turn of the Wheel was even based on the four seasons, like Vivaldi.

Similarly, extreme British doom metal band Esoteric's Paragon of Dissonance, from 2011, could be film music—and not avant-garde film music, either. The demi-classical "Silence" is practically a lullaby, though admittedly, a lullaby sung by deep-voiced gargly monsters. Any child who likes The Muppet Show would be enchanted.

In this context, Om's ponderous flirtation with psychedelia seems less like selling out, and more like the logical slow-motion revelation of doom's spaced-out New Age soul. If Mike Oldfield were getting started today, he wouldn't be playing the tubular bells. He'd be creating feedback washes like Sun 0))).

The link between New Age and metal shouldn't be that surprising. Both types of music have similar trippy hippie roots, as Led Zeppelin's "Battle of Evermore" makes clear enough. Moreover, both tend to elicit contempt from non-believers—and for similar reasons.

Those reasons can perhaps best be summed up as spiritual earnestness. Rock, hip hop, R&B, punk, and other broadly validated pop tends to focus on swagger, style, irony, and heartbreak—if any belief is intended, it's belief in the self. In contrast, New Age opts for starry-eyed transcendent murmurings—and so, in its own much louder way, does metal.