It has been four years since Elder’s last album, the excellent Dead Roots Stirring. This follow up carries on with the Massachusetts trios endlessly inventive ability to meld heavy rock, psych melodies and a stoner vibe into sonic landscapes that suck you in like a black hole.
They make the accepted notions of song structure redundant as each track twists and spirals around itself. Melodies seduce you and titanic riffs bludgeon you into a trance. Elder have weeded all of the needless padding from prog, got to the heart of what makes a stoner/psych album retune your skull, and distilled riffs down to their raw power, a power that could snuff out suns.
Elder open doors to other worlds of pure sensory pleasure. If you are already a fan then you will be delighted by Lore, if you are one of the lucky ones yet to discover their world then dive in. Lore continues the exploration of heavy psychedelia that the band have been honing this past few years. What single them out is their deftness and lightness of touch, never descending into sludge or repetition makes the journey so invigorating.
A journey is what every track is, the shortest one 9.28, the longest nigh on 16 minutes. Yet each and every one leads you in different directions and reveals fresh soundscapes, seductive, beguiling and then suddenly monumental and terrifying. They are cinematic in scope, in fact if it was a film it would have been scripted by Michael Moorcock and directed by John Milius.
Iain Hazlewood
Buy it on Bandcamp:
Label: Stickman Records
Track Listing:
Compendium
Legend
Lore
Deadweight
Spirit at Aphelion
