![]() ![]() DiSalvo relocated to Berlin a few years ago, hit the reset button, and started looking at his life through a different lens. The Gold And Silver Sessions saw Elder transmute their grandstanding stoner rock with a motorik beat and a transcendence-through-repetition mindset. That approach went on to inform the songwriting practise of Omens and created a new alchemy in their sound: one part anguished to two parts ecstatic. There was an open, relaxed-muscle quality to that record where simple melodic motifs were given more room to wander. ![]() They arrived at Omens by way of last year’s mini-album The Gold And Silver Sessions, a heavily improvised live studio session and, in DiSalvo’s words, an opportunity to “take a breath and float and jam”. But Elder’s journey to this new one has been different. Before, Elder’s power has stemmed from their dizzying intricacy, what DiSalvo calls “the blistering onslaught of part after part after part”. It is an album that seethes with what guitarist, vocalist, lead songwriter and band leader Nick DiSalvo calls “vitriol and anger and sadness” at the destruction of the world he loves in myriad appalling ways.įor all this through-a-glass-darkly pessimism, Omens is not an overbearing (nor an overly intense) album. But they’ve never been as portentous as on Omens, their new album released during a uniquely fraught period in this late-capitalist era of ennui. One thing Elder has always been is portentous, from their album Dead Roots Stirring onwards. When a progressive heavy rock band flattens a small crowd in Camden and a tree comes down in Crouch End, that’s the Elder Effect. My mum’s neighbour emerged into their garden and exclaimed, with all the self-absorbed drama of someone aware of an impending disaster but who does fuck all about it, “Oh no – it’s finally happened.” It had been a wet summer and the tree was waterlogged, and long hollowed out by disease. ![]() We were staying at my mum’s in north London that week.Īt some point during Elder’s set, they both heard a huge crack and saw the enormous black poplar tree at the end of the neighbour’s garden topple forward. It showed my mum’s back garden that night, obscured with an immense sprawling shadow. I had just emerged from seeing Elder for the first time at the Camden Underworld venue in August 2017, when I picked up a message from my wife. ![]()
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