![]() ![]() I get the feeling that DiSalvo would be perfectly happy if Elder were an instrumental band, since he spends so little of Omens actually singing. DiSalvo still sings in a burly post-hardcore bellow - not quite a metal growl, but not anything pretty either. Omens works as headphones-based zone-out music - music for letting your thoughts wander and drift. Instead, on Omens, Elder use those riffs as parts of a sweeping, comforting blanket of sound. They just never use those riffs to flatten or punish. With its complicated riff-structures and elegantly piled-up waves of sound, Omens sometimes ventures off into jazzy post-rock territory.īut Elder are still fully capable of coming up with vast elephantine riffs. More than past Elder records, Omens is beautifully rich and layered, concerned with texture over grandeur. Elder have never been afraid of keyboards, but there are a lot of keyboards on Omens: Ghostly organ moans, analog Tangerine Dream drone-whines, impressionistic sighs of synthetic strings, glowing Fender Rhodes tones. DiSalvo and Risberg both play keyboards, and the Italian synth master Fabio Cuomo also plays on the album. ![]() The new guitarist Michael Risberg has come on board, too, so Elder are no longer a trio. Matt Couto, Elder’s founding drummer, is gone, and they’ve replaced him with Georg Edert. As with the band’s previous albums, Omens blurs into one heady whole.īut Omens does stand out from past Elder albums in a few ways. When you’re actually listening to Elder, you probably aren’t thinking about where one song stops and the next begins. But that’s only impressive when you’re watching the little progress bar of your streaming platform glacially ooching forward. Only one song clocks in under the 10-minute mark, and that only only barely does. Omens, for instance, has five tracks spread over 56 minutes. Elder are undisputed masters of the long song. People always talk about time when they talk about Elder. It’s music for watching clouds drift indifferently by, for losing track of time. Omens is one more step along that journey - an expansive shag-carpet symphony. Elder weren’t exactly ear-crushing hellions at any point in their history, but they’ve moved further and further from the growling bombast of metal over the years, towards a bucolic style of psychedelic prog that only occasionally gives way to thunderous riffage. But these days, they’re way more doom than metal. Elder are a product of the metal underground, specifically the doom-metal side of things. Howard’s mythical and apocalyptic Conan The Barbarian stories. ![]() The new Elder album is called Omens, but it could just as easily be Reflections Of A Crashing World.Įlder started in 2006 a lot of their earliest songs were directly inspired by Robert E. This week, Elder are releasing their newest album into a world that’s only just managing to remain afloat. The idea behind “the floating world” had everything to do with fragility, with the idea that our society was in a state of fantastical suspended animation and that it could all end at any point. At the time, frontman Nick DiSalvo said, “The term ‘the floating world’ comes from a particular period in Japanese society which is associated with a flourishing of the arts, but also a self-destructively decadent lifestyle.” So Elder were celebrating the temporary nature of the society that allowed them to make their churning and beatific stoner-metal. Three years ago, the psychedelic Massachusetts power trio released an album called Reflections Of A Floating World, and they had their reasons for picking that title. The floating world doesn’t float the way it once did.
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