ELODEA - cataclysmic
(CD/LP,
Basement Apes / Fuck Yoga)
Metalbands with a penchant for oversize mythological
animals are easily identified as all belonging to a special sector of heavy
guitar music: the slow kind with the wall of noise sound. The Doom, Sludge,
Neurosis-school of metal, whatever. I don’t care. And I don’t because
Elodea is a force to be reckoned with. Needing seven years (including three
years of hiatus) to complete their first full length, they seem like
underground and fringe enough to be serious about their music on the one
hand, and seem to be rocking the basements in Slovenia just as seriously on
the other hand. Which boils down to a heart welcome in Cracked land. Their
vision is one of the beauty in decay, the downfall of western civilization
or rather the decade-long implosion leading to misery and despair.
Elodea structure their songs not by riffs or the old
verse / chorus dialectic but in waves. Like an everlasting tide bringing an
enormous flood the single parts of their songs rip the beach and wash over
the listener in a steady income of heavy hits. If you stare at a heavy sea
for long enough, you will lose the focus on single waves but start to see
the surface of the sea as one bucking, wild, dangerous force of nature. Of
course, there are some more, ahm … gentle parts, with just a plucked
guitar or less pounding, but that is just a moment to breathe before the
next wave of pounding sets in.
Though Elodea use the basic metal line up of a four
people group, they don’t hang themselves onto the so well known and
overused ways to play and sound. Maybe it is easier to name a few things you
won’t find on this record: staccato riffs, guitar solos on high notes, or
actually no guitar solos and no high notes, posing. There is also no
“rock” in the sense that Led Zeppelin (with “Black Dog” still being
the stoner rock song with the highest concentration of riffage there is –
like all Kyuss rolled in one) started; instead everything builds to the same
end. Guitars and bass add layer by layer, drums build more energy,
everythings gets more dense and tighter and bigger and more devastating. And
when tension reaches its top usually the vocals set in, screaming, hoarse
and desperate. Everything crashes down around the listener in big blasts of
noise and doom, repeated pounds and earthquakes of distorted chords, the
pain of mind, the burden of doom and all the things “cataclysmic” can
mean.
And this is also were my only claim to less than
perfection of this record comes from: I have a hard time even getting a
sense of what it means they are singing about: “scream with me into the
intestine of uncertainty. Dream with me in the depths of the universe.
It’s like killing the giant’s rhythm…” What? I stand puzzled and
bewildered. I sense that there is a lot of anger and despair, world coming
to its end, the post-apocalyptic world of doom, brutality and violence
already upon us and so on, but I sense that as much from the music as I do
from the words. Maybe even more from the music. Someone now will tell me,
that this is exactly the desired effect: the words ought to puzzle me so I
think about them more and to understand with my emotions rather than with my
mind is the first small step to salvation. Okay, fine then.
