Explosions in the Sky meets Pelican? Kyuss covering an Isis cover of a Rush tune? Elder's Lore opens up a lot of almost there comparisons, all kinda close, none really hitting the nail on the head. Post rock played with stoner doom instrumentation?
Autistically defining EXACTLY what a band is is a fun pasttime that seperates us from the normies, but moving on, it's a fun album. It's big and warm and fuzzy while fairly effortlessly nailing some really big, crunching crecendos. It's your dad who feels bad for walking out on your mum years ago, so when you go to his place it's just sweets and soft drinks and video games for the whole weekend. I feel the album artwork sums up the album pretty well- this isn't some austere, grim, restrained music, it's not some boring as shiiiiiit music-for-adults thing, it's big and colourful and pretty and considering the long ass songs very accessible.
I recently put this one on when having a few drinks with friends, and i think the accessible-but-still-great thing shone through there. Perfectly decent background music, with the five of us all going quiet when the title track's glorious, just absolutely obliterating, Isis-ish-with-more-interesting-guitar-lines crescendo started really roaring through. And it is a pretty amazing moment, an almost kraut rocky build up, a huge doomy pound, it goes through a lot of phases and they're all really really good.
So yeah, it is a fun album, I think there's things to critique if I'm being picky, but I have to be fairly picky. A few of the transitions are fairly awkward, basically just two random riffs slapped together; I'm not saying this is always a bad thing, it doesn't have to be super smooth. You just get the feeling that sometimes the dudes had no idea where to take a tune so smashed two things together and called it a day. The vocals also a bit weak, important to song structure and all that, just a bit forced, tendency for the same few vocal lines, you can tell that the guy is a guitarist first and foremost. Or bassist? No idea tbh. Finally, based on how well they execute the one really quiet moment on the album, you can't help but think there could be a tiny bit more of that, just a bit of extra dynamic colour to add a bit more variety to the canvas, yknow?
Overall I'm not inclined to say this is the most amazing album I've ever heard but it is very good, verging on great, and it'll cop a hammering when summer comes along in a few months, particularly the pure dopamine to the eyeballs that is the title track. I feel like their next album, Reflections, is a bit better, but this is still well worth getting; Elder are really in a league on their own as far as stoner metal goes these days.