Elder – Omens 2 xlp

Elder – Omens 2 xlp

This is the band from Massachusetts that has relocated to Berlin.

"But Omens does stand out from past Elder albums in a few ways. We’re dealing with a whole new band now. Matt Couto, Elder’s founding drummer, is gone, and they’ve replaced him with Georg Edert. The new guitarist Michael Risberg has come on board, too, so Elder are no longer a trio. DiSalvo and Risberg both play keyboards, and the Italian synth master Fabio Cuomo also plays on the album. 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. More than past Elder records, Omens is beautifully rich and layered, concerned with texture over grandeur. With its complicated riff-structures and elegantly piled-up waves of sound, Omens sometimes ventures off into jazzy post-rock territory.

But Elder are still fully capable of coming up with vast elephantine riffs. They just never use those riffs to flatten or punish. Instead, on Omens, Elder use those riffs as parts of a sweeping, comforting blanket of sound. Omens works as headphones-based zone-out music — music for letting your thoughts wander and drift. But it still rocks. DiSalvo still sings in a burly post-hardcore bellow — not quite a metal growl, but not anything pretty either. 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. But his lyrics, in throatily poetic fashion, describe a society that’s already looking at its own ruins: “Wasting away/ In the embers of power/ Not a voice to remain/ Echoes of the past.”" - Tom Breihan