ELEPHANT9 — Atlantis (with Reine Fiske) (review)

ELEPHANT9 — Atlantis (with Reine Fiske) album cover Album · 2012 · Fusion Buy this album from MMA partners
4/5 ·
Sean Trane
Third album (if you don’t count a vinyl-only live album) from this Norwegian keyboard-lead trio, but this time with the addition of a famous Swedish guitarist called Reine Fiske (Landberk, Paatos & Dungen) for over half the seven tracks. Basically, you’re dealing with the usual Elephant9 album (even down to the boring-as-usual Rune-Grammofon label artwork) but with the notable input from one of Scandinavia’s most exciting and “out-there” (as in psych) guitarist, which adds a considerable element that can answer Storlokken’s wide array of keyboards that include a Rhodes, a Hammond, a Minimoog and piano. Oh yeah, bassist Ellertsen plays also some acoustic 12-strings as well.

Even the opening Black Hole sounds like the chaotic quagmire announced in its title, but the power and interplay between the three compadres is simply irresistible: you’ll have the sound up to 11 in no time. A Foot In Both is a much quieter and pensive affair, where Ellertsen’s 12-strings guitar takes the lead role above the moog and organ layers. The title track opens on smooth keyboard layers, but gradually Fiske’s guitar draws the controlled chaos with its feedback

The long anxiogenic thunder rolls of Psychedellic Backfire suggest that we’re in the last throes of the lost mythological Atlantis civilization, where the tsunami waves attack regularly the cliffs of what were once a continent and now only a chaplet of reef. Once the waves have done their destruction, the booming bass and sinister Hammond drones are describing explosion of pockets of molten magma flowing from your speakers and coming in contact with whatever’s left of Atlantis’ trade goods storage buildings.

Elsewhere, the dominating element in the short A Place In Neither is the demented Ellertsen bass riff. Hendrixian feedback guitar is dominating the first part of the 13-mins+ Freedom’s Children, which sports its name quite well. The middle sections speeds up and goes bonkers gradually and starts saturating until its chaotic and explosive end.

Well, despite the addition of Fike, Atlantis is certainly well in the artistic line of E9’s discography, while adding a little “je-ne-sais-quoi” (guitars of course) as icing on the cake; and I take the bet that it’s probably going to be the apex of the band, unless they add more musicians
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