Each Other – Being Elastic

 Avant-garde rock band Each Other have just dropped their eccentric debut album, Being Elastic. The 12 track LP features singles Your Ceiling Is My Floor which SPIN commented on, saying it’s a track that “jangles out of your speakers like the last song at a pop-punk prom, its drawled vocal backing off at the right moments to reveal little details that score the fade to black.”, and the stylishly executed, About The Crowd.

 

Brad Loughead, Mike Wright and Christian Simmons dedicated years of their lives eating, breathing and sleeping music, carefully crafting and shaping their sound until they perfected the psychedelic union that is Each Other. The Canadian trio showcased their talents to friends, family and local art-rock supporters on the Montreal progressive scene before Lefse Records contracted their infectious befuddled arrangement of sound and signed them to their label.

 

Being Elastic has an outlandish quality to it that surpasses proper expression through mere words. The album is a listening experience, which transports the mind to the kooky euphonic world that can only exist between the confines of the ‘drawled vocals’ Space Echo effects and complicated riffs – riffs which are invaded by other riffs and shot in a whole new direction – resulting in a terribly brilliant garden of musical worm-holes that both titillate and intrigue.

 

Being Elastic is a musical game of hide-and-seek. You’re never quite sure where the next lyric is going to lead to or where the next unexpected note is going to pop out from. The first track on the album About The Crowd, sounds to me a bit like if you imagine MGMT vocals layered over a Queens of the Stone Age instrumental backdrop. (Please don’t kill me for saying that.). On first impressions all I could think of was Keep Your Eyes Peeled with Andrew VanWyngarden taking the lead instead of Josh Homme. But how wrong I was.

 

Each Other are one of the most innovative groups I’ve heard in quite a while and I predict that they’re headed towards a major breakthrough after Being Elastic which was released March 4th 2014, starts circulating around the globe. A breakthrough which usually doesn’t happen until the third album release is totally possible for a group such as this who launched from a place of serious talent, perseverance, raw passion and a firm foundation. Their album sounds well rounded, accomplished and like a group of guys who became experts in their fields and are now fluent in their overall understanding and delivery of it.

 

Being Elastic is an album which lays between the realms of music and fantasy. It is an album for the artfully inclined, the dreamers, the out-of-the-box thinkers, the escapists and those who are hungry for a new sound that awakens the soul. This is an album which plays like a breath of fresh air on a somewhat stale music scene. It will undoubtedly be the soundtrack of long summer nights spent partying on a beach under the stars.

 

The trio who record all their music in a home-built studio, are scheduled to embark on their world tour this spring, starting at SXSW, along with fellow new act Future Death, in Austin this May.

 

I don’t know about you but I’m anticipating a visit to our side of the pond already.