Do you hear that clap of thunder ringing from the mountain? It must be a new Elder album on the rise from the Old One's keep. Elder may have crawled from the primordial ooze to as a Conan the Barbarian themed doom metal band, but they've since tasted the fruit of the tree of knowledge, as sewn by psychic wanders Pink Floyd, and drank from the enchanted fount in the court of King Crimson, and now they are more than meer homage to a legend, they are a legend themselves. Through their travels in this barren world, they have acquired a crystal third eye, embedded on the inside of their skulls, which allows them foresight into possible futures and visions of dimensions that lay beyond humankind's purview. Amongst their many visions, they have foreseen the collapse of an empire once thought mighty and inviolable. This realm at the tipping point of abrupt decay is the subject of their fifth album, Omens.
2017's Reflections of a Floating World marked a significant departure for the band from the stoner metal of their adolescent releases. On that album, Elder depicted a world held aloft in a beautiful, but precarious and unsustainable balancing act, through transcendent fizzling space rock and heavy psychedelic cascades. It's tempting to draw comparisons between our world and the worlds that Elder describes vividly in their music, as many of the events they sing about are inspired events from our timeline, however, I think we'd be best to avoid the fates of the people depicted on Omens if the option is still open to us. Things don't exactly go right for the children of that empire, as I'm sure you can surmise.
While Omens develops various themes introduced on Elder's last album and delivers on many of the promises and potentials hinted at on that release, the band's roots in the American doom metal circuit have yet to be uprooted, and still form a gnarled mass lodged deep with the center of Omens' molten iron core. The title track "Omens" features heavy, fog hallowed guitars that climb and plummet into pools of rippling psychedelic feedback, rolling and folding reflected starlight in the wake of each mighty riffs passage. Less constrained stylistically is the following track, "In Procession," which is driven by effervescent arpeggiated chord progressions, flashy star-towing grooves and complementary, phasor skipping synths with some asteroid crushing Mastodon-esque grit thrown in for good measure. Elder shakes things up further on the latter half with "Embers," a very '90s alternative rock inspired track, which dips into progressive reworkings of Pearl Jam riffs while making room for the dashing starlight pierce of twirling synth arrangements and billowing clouds of electric nebula distortion. The world Elder shows us on Omens may be doomed, but it is resplendent in its decline.
Grab a copy from Armageddon Records, here.
