Elf Power
In A Cave
Rykodisc
By Doug Wallen
Elf Power are nothing if not survivors. Born as a humble home-taping project before being swept into last decade’s Elephant 6 collective, today the Georgia band continues to deluge the world with its prolific output. In A Cave is the eighth proper Elf Power album, not counting the covers-heavy castoffs Nothing’s Going To Happen and Treasures From the Trash Heap.
Anchored still by the pleasantly dazed songwriting of sleepy-voiced Andrew Reiger, Elf Power has grown up a lot over the past few albums. And yet superficially these guys sound remarkably like they did on – and ever since – 2000’s The Winter Is Coming, for which they smoothed the unruly roughness of their first two showings and the David Fridmann-produced masterpiece, A Dream In Sound.
What remains is a fuzzy, mid-tempo take on psychedelic pop, stuffed with fairy-tale lyrics and ’60s inspired instrumentation while always feeling consistent and easy to swallow. This time around, there are unabashed nods to T. Rex in “New Lord” and “Spiral Stairs,” twitchy experimental swirls on “Window to Mars,” and warm country flavors seeping into the closer “Midnight Crawls Out,” easily the best of the batch. “Softly Thru The Void” is another standout, thanks to a sharp-eyed sentiment (‘I wanted not to want it’) and a Byrds-esque marriage of melancholy and jangle.
Some lyrics here seem lifted from earlier albums, whereas ‘Icy hands melt away’ is actually a reference to “Icy Hands Will Never Melt Away,” off 1997’s When The Red King Comes. Reiger fares better when he pushes the fantasy elements back under his bed and writes songs with a more universal reach. Another weakness is how much the songs sound alike, but that also gives In A Cave the feeling of one long, soupy song. And at the risk of oversimplifying things, if you like that song, you’ll be happy to inhabit this space time and time again, sameness be damned.
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