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(2022) Elkhorn - Distances
Review:
Elkhorn has always been a duo of two guitarists—Jesse Shepherd on acoustic and Drew Gardner on electric—locked for long periods in an improvisatory trance. Together, but not exactly in sync, the two set up folk-blues atmospheres and puncture them with transcending, psychedelic eruptions. Their pieces move organically from one idea to another, at the lumbering, ruminating speed of wordless communication, and you get the sense that, on another day, at another time, they might move in an entirely different direction. For Distances, they have added a pair of drummers. Ian McColm played with David Shapiro and Stefan Christiansen in the drone-ambient outfit Nagual through the Teens; he has also collaborated with Daniel Bachman, Tashi Dorji and Nate Scheible, the other drummer on the disc. Scheible is similarly well connected, a veteran of Mean Crow (with Luke Stewart) and Scarcity of Tanks. The two percussionists perform the same kind of free-wheeling exchange as Sheppard and Gardner, with each other and with the two guitarists. They move in loose conjunction, sharing a beat, but seeing it differently, one walloping a tom while the other strikes shimmery, slither-y cymbal tones, one nailing the time with rimshots on snare, the other setting off wild, flaring fills. You can hear that there are two of them if you listen closely, but it’s hard to say where one ends and the other picks up. The drumming is the wild card in Distances, an album that shakes up Elkhorn’s meditative sound and makes it more visceral, ominous and live. You can hear it best in “1919,” the second-longest track, which like all four of these pieces begins in finger-picked shimmer and ends in free-roaming, electrified jam. In the middle, though, sits just under two minutes of percussive interplay. The two drummers enter a conversation, one rolling chaotically over the toms, the other building a buzz in snare fills punctuated by cymbal explosions. They run at each other at angles, on the same beat, but approaching from different directions, meeting, conflicting, melding where they touch, jumping off of one another’s ideas. It ends as abruptly as it began and ushers in a placid sunshine of acoustic again, the buzzing dissonance of electric guitar looming up through it. Different parts of Distances will remind you, at least tangentially, of different artists. The slow, repeated, blues-steeped swagger of “Train,” for instance, sounds a lot like Jonathan Kane’s transcendent chugs. The clean lines of electric melody in “1919” evoke Richard Bishop in Rangda. Bits of Chris Forsyth’s psychedelic riffery peek through “Wilderness.” And yet, what they sound like most is Elkhorn, enlarged and enlivened and evolving, but nonetheless themselves. You’d have to add more than a couple of drummers to change that. — dustedmagazine
Track List:
01 - Train
02 - Wilderness
03 - 1919
04 - Distances, Part 1
05 - Distances, Part 2
Media Report:
Genre: alternative folk, psychedelic rock
Country: New York, New York, USA
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits
Compression mode: Lossless
Writing library: libFLAC 1.2.1 (UTC 2007-09-17)
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