By Jason Walker
Elephant Tree are generally held in quite high regard throughout a lot of alternative music bands and fans alike, quite frequently seen on festival lineups that feature somewhat off-the-beaten track artists such as Arctangent, Desertfest or Manchester’s Riffolution Fest. Boasting quite a unique sound that lets them slip into a myriad of different lineups, their self-stated stoner/doom/psych sound ends up with a proggy streak and makes for some pretty bloody interesting stuff.
Their latest endeavour, ‘Habits’, is no different here: eight tracks (well seven – there’s an intro track) of varying length that boast dirty riffs, ethereal vocals, and big, fat, fuzzy bass. The intro leads into the first single from this album, ‘Sails’ and that guitar tone is just goddamn tasty, anyone who’s familiar with the likes of Kyuss will be familiar with that overdriven mids sound, accented with that fat bass work makes for music you just want to take a big ol’ bong rip to.
‘Faceless’ keeps the steam going with some rather odd chord usage but man, it keeps dropping into a passage that is just so damn heavy it’s like scraping the guitar across gravel. Stuff like this is a real different kind of heavy when compared to a lot of extreme metal and the like, it’s just got this low, pounding, excruciating feel to it and this sort of stiff epitomises that.‘Exit The Soul’ seems a little at odds with them sounding more poppy than others, I mean they don’t lose the core sound but they seem oddly more colourful but it’s always good to see experiments even in the middle of an album.
Now with ‘The Fall Chorus’ I am an absolute sucker for acoustic stuff in this sort of theme, as a long time folk music fan from family influences this song really sticks out for me, and towards the end is some pretty wonderful fiddle work, lovely stuff. Following this is what I genuinely hope would be single two from this album, should they choose to release it as it’s easily my favourite track off this album, ‘Bird’. This song evokes all sorts of sounds from the likes of Tool, Hurt, Rishloo, all that sort of late 90s, early 2000s prog, there’s something about the quiet parts mixed with the big pounding passages that proper does it for me.
As with a lot of stoner and doom style bands, you can usually hear a bit of a Black Sabbath influence throughout most of their stuff, and with ‘Wasted’ you can really hear this come through in a big way, all the way from the guitar riffs to the vocals, but also you get some early Pink Floyd in there too, quite an interesting mix.
Finally the album closes with ‘Broken Nails’, which starts with more somber, quiet acoustic playing before bringing the rest of the band in for a really slow, melancholic song but functions as quite an epic ending to this album with an ever slowing breakdown towards the end, this wraps up this nice chunk of heavy fuzz – totally worth a listen if you like your stoner doom!
FFO: Kyuss, Electric Wizard, Mammoth Weed Wizard Bastard, Bongripper
‘Habits’ is released on Friday (24 April). You can get your copy HERE.
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