Welcome to The Harmonic Series, a music review series - exclusive to Steemit - where I’ll be discussing music across many different styles and genres from metal, to electronic music, to jazz and beyond! I’ll be talking up exciting new releases, some of my personal classics, and anything else that I think is worth checking out. Some of the reviews I share will be brand new, and some will be from my personal archives.
Today’s review is an album of riffs and licks that never stop giving:
Elder - Reflections of a Floating World (2017, Stickman Records)
Genre: Metal
Style: Stoner Metal, Progressive Rock, Psychedelic Rock
Elder is a band I stumbled upon, and then subsequently stumbled into love with. I must have been playing hearthstone late one night and been listening to albums on YouTube, clicking through art and names that I thought looked or sounded cool in the related videos. In fact, it likely began with Electric Wizard’s Dopethrone, on the popular and aptly named stoner and doom metal curation channel Stoned Meadow of Doom. At some point, I came across the fantastic, colorful and expressionistic cover art for their 2015 album Lore. In the first moments of Lore, it struck me that there was something else going on here than simply the thick tones and somewhat predictable riffs of the average stoner metal band. Stylishly harmonized guitar lines syncopations, and strong hooks were at every turn, and it seemed the band wasn’t content to just jam on one riff as long as their peers in genre. This, I realized, was progressive rock hybridized with stoner metal in the most effective way imaginable, something I’d never quite heard before.
My roommate in college at the time I discovered Elder shared similar tastes, especially in the realms of stoner metal, and showed interest when I was revisiting the album for the first time in our room, and it soon ended up on regular rotation in our apartment. Elder felt fresh and exciting, and soon after discovering them, they announced Reflections of a Floating World with the single The Falling Veil. Riding high on the excitement of a newly discovered gem of a band announcing something to be released so soon meant this record was highly anticipated for me. On this album, the Boston trio has upgraded their lineup to a five-piece in studio and a four-piece for their touring band, and it shows in the new layers and depth of these recordings. Pedal steel slide guitar and electric piano/organ augment the core drums, bass, and guitar configuration, and where the band was previously tight and somewhat dry in production, their sound has opened up into wider atmospheres and more detailed soundscapes that give the grandiosity of their themes even more weight and immediacy.
Their guitar tone - the core measure of any band working around the stoner metal idiom - is possibly better than ever, and on full display at the outset of album-opener Sanctuary, beginning with a very satisfying naturally compressed and broken up sound with gently pumping subharmonics. An air of the mystical and hallowed hangs over this song, as one could infer from the title Sanctuary, and this is confirmed in the lyrics, with imagery of divinity and a book of faith, and materialized in the air of transcendent awe present in the lydian riff that concludes the song. But don’t mistake this album for one of religious devotion; the revelation here is in the falling of a “crimson veil” of belief once taken for granted. and confrontation with what reality presents us: the eponymous floating world is not fantasy as the cover art and sense of mystical may imply, but rather the very earth we inhabit, drifting through the void of space. On The Falling Veil, vocalist Nick DiSalvo sings defiantly of “Throwing off the chains, cursing years in vain / Living in a myth, the boundaries of which lie in decay,” imbuing the earth itself with the redemptive qualities once sought and - as it seems - not found in faith. The band might be at their most musically progressive yet, alternating between odd meter riffs in seven, to soaring motion of a 6/8 groove, to a hard hitting 4/4, and ending back on seven. Indeed, Elder seems like the synthesis of the lineage of both the doom-godfather’s Black Sabbath and the proto-progressive rock themes and arrangements of Led Zeppelin.
Following the realization, Staving Off the Truth deals with the difficulties of coming to terms with a faith that has proven itself false, and fittingly this song is musically the heaviest on the album, with sludgy guitars rushing into focus after a contemplative and spaced out psychedelic intro. DiSalvo’s lyricism across this album is immaculately crafted and refined, rarely using an unneeded word. The simplicity sometimes renders his meaning unclear and abstract, but this is backed up expertly by the way the verses are spaced across the songs, which all average out to about 10 minutes in length each. Verses typically come as sections change, and the listener is given time to reflect on and ponder their meanings and implications as the instrumental grooves, jams, and riffs that divide them unfold. On Thousand Hands, the band fires off with possibly the best riff on the album about two minutes deep, with a lead tone that wails as much as their rhythm tone grooves, and delivers their final and most cryptic message, which I’ll refrain from spoiling with my speculative interpretations.
This is the sound of a band making use of space and time with expert efficiency, pushing it when they need to and never quite overstepping. I mean this both in the individual tracks, the structure of the album as a whole, and especially in the arc of their career. From Dead Roots Stirring, to Lore, and now with Reflections of a Floating World, the band has progressed their style at a pace that lets them fully explore the potential of each iteration of their style and develop enough new ideas to keep listeners hooked. With fleshed out production and expanded arrangements, Elder have made their memorable and impactful material shine better than ever on this latest release. This is something that every fan of metal and progressive rock should at very least take note of, if not outright exalt as the pinnacle of this stylistic synthesis and the benchmark for where it can go in the future.
To buy/stream Reflections of a Floating World, head over to Elder's Bandcamp Page.
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