This time last year, give or take, I had my first taste of The Stolen Moans with the punkish, popish, raw, rebellious, rabble-rousing, garage-metal riot that is “Bard-Inspired Trechery Chaos & Heartache.” Life was never quite the same again. Once it’s fist-in-the-air, rock and roll reinventions had done their work on my brain, I just wanted all rock music to be this brave, this brash, this big, this bombastic, and many other things not necessarily beginning with the letter b.
And if that felt like any subsequent album would have a lot to live up to, live up to it, the strangely named “Elbows Don’t Have Eyes” does.
“More” plays the old school New York punk ‘n’ roll card, feeling like something you might have heard from the support band when you watched Blondie at CBGB’s back in the day. But even when in retro mode, they still feel like the freshest, most important rock and roll band of the moment.
“Damned Sweet” feels as if it could have existed in those times as readily as it sits comfortably with todays tastes, a sort of timeless bridge joining the dots of all the things that matter in rock music – kick ass beats, squalling riffs, driving bass lines and a call and response between anthemic lead vocals and a gang chorus…damned sweet indeed.
“Morning Scars” calms things down a bit and heads into more scintilating pop-infused rock realms, the cultish colliding with the commercial, and “I’m A Crow” grows from a gothic spoken word bruiser into an explosion of fractured and fragmented metallic shards and salvos of gnarled sonics. Not for the faint-hearted.
Elbows… is one of those albums that looks at the rock and roll landscape and sets new standards. It sets a benchmark for the competition, it says, “Things need to change, so why not follow our lead?” They are correct, and people should. This is the template; bands now need to go and explore its potential to their own ends.
Oh, I’ve just thought of another one…beautiful, in its own jagged and jarring sort of way.
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