Jul. 09, 2008 - Issue #664: Rocky 12
New Sounds - Elliot Brood
Mountain Meadows
(Six Shooter)
Toronto-based band Elliott Brood—there is no single Elliott in the band, the Brood being a shadowy figure constructed out of vocalist/guitarist/ukulele- and banjo-picker Mark Sasso, guitarist/vocalist/ukulele-picker Casey LaForet and drummer Steve Pitkin—has a way of sounding like a ghost from the past while remaining firmly rooted in the modern times. It’s like a traveller—someone part preacher/part snake-oil salesman—rolled his covered wagon right out of the 19th century and parked it in the 21st.
There’s a tendency to approach Elliott Brood’s music like this, with a sort of literary reach that fills in the blanks that the band leaves in its songs. Maybe that’s because the band draws ideas from the past—Mountain Meadows references the Mountain Meadows massacre, the slaughter of 120 emigrants by a Mormon miltia in 1857—but than lets the narratives find their own way rather than forcing a historical storyline into the songs.
It’s hard to pull exact details from the album—it’s more like snapshots of various characters and places that come together in the listener’s mind to construct a tale that no doubt shifts and changes between different people, and sometimes likely even for an individual listening for a second, third or fourth time.
This talk of the past, of course, is in spite of the fact that the band’s sound is a mix of acoustic instruments and a generous heaping of distortion, which has the effect of disconnecting the sound from a particular time period: is it old-sounding because it’s acoustic? Is it modern-sounding because of the distortion? No, it’s simply rootless, drifting to wherever it needs to be.
It should also be noted that Elliott Brood refuses to play it safe when it comes to structuring the songs. There are few predictable patterns to be found on Mountain Meadows; the mostly instrumental “Chuckwagon” rides a swell of growling, rolling guitars, sounding very much like the hunter hunting its prey, until it culminates in a thunderous roar punctuated with the band’s distant scream of “Chuckwagon!” avoiding the standard use of verses and chorus in favour of something that keeps you guessing and which travels where the music needs to go, rather than where popular opinion might deem that it should go.
Throughout the record the band takes advantage of the multiple voices at its disposal. There are the obvious alternating leads that Sasso and Laforet engage in, but there’s also the spooky shouting—as on “Chuckwagon”—that marks the band’s sound. On “Write It All Down For You,” the shouts of “Hey! Hey! Hey!” combine with Pitkin’s drum shots to conjure a sharp crack that could easily stand in for rifle shots.
Mountain Meadows is the sort of album that picks you up and carries you along on a journey, although it’s never an easy trip, and there are times when you might not want to be there. But then again, that just makes it all the more worth it when you come out the other side and see a ray of sunshine splashing over the open prairie ahead. V
New comments for this entry have been turned off and any existing ones are hidden. We apologize for any inconvenience.