Review: Elan ‘Elan Vs Elan’
Once again, emanating forth from the riff mines of Salford’s APF Records are yet more disturbingly brutal noises brought to you by Andrew Fields.
Boasting a roster that features some of the nastiest audio rackets generated by the underground, if you are not getting the listening equivalent of a concussion or whiplash from an APF release, then you probably aren’t paying close enough attention.
The latest sonic grenade being lobbed into the public arena comes from Norwich duo Shane Miller (frontman of A Horse Called War & William English) and Joseph Woodbury (William English & Armed With Books). Having worked together since they were 14, the pair share a symbiotic understanding of extreme, left-field ideas and a love of music, film and unsettling heavy music which they would draw together to realise as Elan.
Sharing a kindred spirit with underground supergroup Utopia, who released their rabid debut Stalker through the label back in 2021, the band deliberately throw unpredictable curveballs and unsettling detours at you with more regularity than a toddler’s mood swings. Whilst John Bailey’s savage, Avengers-like Utopia are a blaze of technicality and gonzo signature changes, the unrelenting sounds of Elan are a journey into Heart of Darkness levels of filth and madness.
They say you should never judge a book by its cover, well in this case you should absolutely judge the music by the artwork. Featuring a depiction of a pair of mutant rabbits sat on a couch, having murdered two people and with a TV in the foreground (mimicking the masks the pair wear live as a tribute to a short film by recently departed master of surrealist, dystopian cinema David Lynch). One glance and Elan Vs Elan looks fucking nuts before you even hit play.
A hail of feedback ushers in Two Angry Men, the title itself taken as a homage to the film 12 Angry Men from which it borrows an extended sample for its runtime – in fact all of the eight tracks on the album are influenced, or directly reference, films in a loose concept that hangs the album together. Over the garbled sample, molten riffs of slow, slamming sludge batter against the discordant whine in a brooding and atmospheric opening.
The belligerent hammering, a literal cacophony of chaos, ushers in Behind This Place, the first ‘song’ (a loose term here) on the album. Miller’s hardcore shouts, throat rippingly coarse rage with lyrics lifted from Mulholland Drive, while Woodbury pulverises the kit as the violent churning guitars (also courtesy of Miller) grind through a workout with no repeated sections. Roars back the seething, feral screams in a Neurosis-like number that tumbles like being caught in a washing machine on a spin cycle.
Don’t Talk Turkey is a short, vicious salvo of madness. Another Lynch-inspired piece of absurdism that lobs grooves like grenades and switches the balance to different, undulating rhythms that spin off in scattershot directions like shrapnel raining debris on a battlefield. This breathless howitzer is over and done before you can even clock what is going on.
vicious salvo of madness…
On a track as off-kilter as the show, Peaks is a more telegraphed tribute to Twin Peaks but careens wildly with huge, catchy riffs, chunky and full of bouncing hooks that belie the thrashing power violence they conjure. It makes me recall a review of Johnny Truant’s In The Library Of Horrific Events, which said if you listened to it on repeat, you might need therapy, only to catch up with a friend who proclaimed he’d listened to it for three days straight… those kinds of vibes.
The heaviest track on the album, To Kill A Gull, is a tumultuous affair, a snarling, whirling dervish of a track that sounds like the duelling vocals are, in their own words, ‘battling each other’ as Jesus Lizard-style yowls and rasping screams collide with the guttural bellows. The jangling guitar turns on a dime (or sixpence, depending on your colloquialism of choice) with Elan taking inspiration from The Lighthouse as the drums clatter and smash.
My English Tongue could realistically be in any language as both vocalists writhe with bullish intonations over a high-impact number that draws from The Witch, whilst Less Stable Readers bludgeons with a black metal hum. The vocals growl with more of a deathly utterance before the barking shrikes begin. Featuring savage breakdowns, the In the Mouth of Madness-influenced number crashes to a stop with a sample setting up the final track.
The, as the band proclaim, ‘long, hypnotic’ final entry to Elan Vs Elan (hypnotic being very much in the eye of the beholder here) is the most extensive of the eight tracks, but despite this accolade, it is still the soundtrack of a brutal mugging. Monstrously heavy and drenched in fuzz, Advocate Cannibalism signs off with samples and lyrics built from lines in Pink Flamingos, one of the most disturbing cult films of all time.
Crazy, schizophrenic, exhausting – All are words that could equally be thrown in the mix to describe this unique debut. At times, Elan Vs Elan is a thrilling, macabre ride, not unlike the works of the man whose films inspired many of the tracks. If Lynch looked to take a scalpel to the dark underbelly of the American psyche, Miller and Woodbury look to take a hammer to the frayed ends of sanity and obliterate it with glee, not caring where the pieces fall.
Much like their muse, some will find their work incredibly polarising, and others will revel in the euphoria of the de(con)struction.
Label: APF Records
Band Links: Facebook | Bandcamp | Spotify | Instagram
Scribed by: Mark Hunt-Bryden
