Review: Elf Power – In a Cave

This review was originally published on Mog.com on 03/23/08

http://mog.com/Kronski/blog/151555

For a few years during the late 1990s, the Elephant Six collective ruled supreme, and bands like Neutral Milk Hotel, Elf Power, and the Apples in Stereo built out and decorated a world of their own, one where the heroes of history books and the bible became intertwined, offering a second story existence from the showroom floor of reality.And that’s what Andrew Rieger’s voice and lyrics do to me when his band creaks into these songs, cracking open a new world, but really returning to an older one, like sitting in an old chair you’d forgotten about,and rocking back and forth, taking us back to that world, and breaking it wide open while pondering the universe as it flies above in the exposed roof overhead.

For these songs seem to know a future that I do not and open up demons in my past, bringing up a time when I had more facial hair and felt the dirty shag carpet of a friend’s living room. The record will become my obsession for a few weeks and then I will return to it, and in so doing I will know, once again, all the dark twists and pitfalls.

For in all of Elf Power’s music, the narrator is a higher power, situated at a level from where he can view the world ahead, and in so participating in this religious exercise that is listening to this record, I felt that I had to preface the listen with the following statement:“Gentle voice, speak to me so that I may see the infinite wisdom, from the clouds that embrace this land of ours, for I through you, have been imparted with this gift of perception, to see all the things that you see and know, for you are my vessel, my only crack into the blissful realms of eternity.”

This sort of religious reference is the results of Rieger’s voice, this lilting thing that comes up from a familiar place, a little voice inside pulling me into the song. And in so doing into skeletons that live inside of it, so all you can hear is the intention of the song, the idea of the singing, an impression, a thumb print on the inside of a cave.

I’ve been following Elf Power since the dawn of Elephant Six, when Laura Carter still played for a band that was too unreal to actually exist, Neutral Milk Hotel. My own memories of seeing Neutral Milk Hotel are murky, late night explosions, songs too overwhelming to take in, Scott Spillane and singing saws, Jeff Magnum being completely transcendent, for in his mind he was not playing in a shitty little dive bar in Columbia, South Carolina, no. He was hosting the god of Shiva the destroyer through his veins and limbs and Shiva was adjusting all thirty-eight notches in his spine.

But while Neutral Milk seemed almost too otherworldly, Elf Power at the time were real people and the good friends of good friends of mine, and Andrew Rieger would send tapes of Jeff Magnum and Elf Power to my friend’s place, and the one we listened to the most, apart from Neutral Milk Hotel’s “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea”, was Elf Power’s first album proper, “When the Red King Comes.”

And the friend who received all of the tapes, who read the letters aloud, in the dingy hardwood floor upstairs apartment, this person, who’s no longer alive, is paired with me forever in Elf Power, and on every record since then I’ve found a little bit of him there.I’m not entirely sure that I am correct about it being there, and maybe I am only hearing it, because each time I miss him, especially on “Walking with the Beggar Boys”, because it sounds like Rieger is feeling the loss as well. For he died a year or so before “Beggar Boys” came out, enough time for his story to be included in the record’s song cycle. I heard his voice in many of the songs, specific lines that referenced my memories of him. And so each time the ghost of him would prop itself up, the tragedy coming back as well, of how someone so alive and so bright one minute can be dead the next.

I tell this story, because on “In A Cave” the songs stretch far back, take a step back sound-wise, right next to “When the Red King Comes”, so close I can make out the yellow paper Andrew’s Letters came on, the smell of the place, my friend’s smile when he listened to the record for the first time, feeling proud that his friend had made such powerful music. So “In a Cave” with its strange interludes, trap doors, bursts of tangled branches of noises, backwards chants that sound like John Lennon inhaling the Tibetan Book of the Dead, has so many caverns and crannies to get lost in, has all of the moss, stalactites and stalagmites of a dirty psychedelic rock record.

“New Illusions appear everyday it’s getting harder to wish them away,”In this song, we can’t tell if Rieger is talking about a young person becoming older in an increasingly jaded world, or if it’s a teenager waiting for the assurance of the drugs to kick in.Either way, at either end of the spectrum, it’s prophetic, and seems to operate on both of these levels simultaneously.There’s something motherly about Rieger’s voice, that until now I hadn’t notice, a comfort for gray skies and that dark inevitable disappointment and deceit that eventually falls on all of us, to fight off friends left behind in dark rooms with bruises all over them.

There are reasons why people cling to music as their salvation, and songs like “New Dark Lord” when taken at face value, could be a new darker lord in the form of the supernatural realm, or a dark political storm brewing, either way if we acknowledge the darkness then we give ourselves permission to live.A bit of fifties girl group in the melody line of “Softly through the Void” lightens the mood a bit, and if that just-mentioned title in itself doesn’t just go ahead and just define the whole record, the gentle passage over the tip of inferno’s tightrope, nothing else will.

“The Demon’s Daughter” comes in towards the end, another title that pits the familial against the fabric of darkness, another juxtaposition of fairytale chaos against the vacuum of the natural world around us, where an evil force is sucking the life out of earth, each drop of ocean, people splinter, one person dies, and into this “one comes alive”. “Demon’s Daugther” opens up the possibility of a messianic figure to show up and straighten things out in the next song, “Quiver and Quake” but that never actually happens, just more natural disasters, but the ship remains on course for one of the better tracks on a record filled with natural peaks and valleys, areas where we are supposed to check out in confusion, to be lulled away by sirens that take us back from the dark islands back into more subtle tones. And in this way, old friends who’ve passed away are brought back through memories, no matter how dark.