ELM will release their new full-length, Dog, this Friday via Italy’s Bronson Recordings. Captured live at the band’s rehearsal studio in April 2017, the record includes a cover of Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues.” Holed up in their den, they used no outside producers or studio trickery, Dog is dirty, sharp, crushing, no-frills rock ‘n’ roll, constantly overloaded but never underestimated.
In advance of its release, The Obelisk is hosting an official premiere of ELM‘s visual accompaniment to the track “Mayhem,” the esteemed blog issuing, “The video in which somebody gets their ass handed to them is for ‘Mayhem,’ and it’s about as fitting a representation as the bruiser of an LP could ask for. Like much of what surrounds on Dog, there’s little use for frills with such an aggressive core to present, and though they supposedly tracked the album live in their rehearsal space – maybe it’s a really nice rehearsal space? – the rawness does nothing to undercut the full impact of the song and instead becomes an essential aesthetic component, not just there but for the album as a whole, which seems to dwell in a ‘Swampland’ of its own making. They may not be from Texas, but ELM definitely manifest that ‘Don’t Mess With…’ ethic one sees on so many bumper stickers from down that way.
Adds the band, “The video was shot in one day in the heart of Pianura Padana, more precisely in the fields surrounding the small town of Pagazzano (near Bergamo), by Italian director Andrea Cavallari (andreacavallari.net) – who already shot our previous video ‘King Of Mormons.’ The story behind the clip is a history of due punishment: you know you did something wrong, so now you know you have to punished, it’s that simple…but even if you agree with your executioners, in the very end you’ll try to avoid the punishment. Obviously, there is no way of escape. It’s time to meet the ‘Mayhem.'”
Read more and view “Mayhem,” courtesy of The Obelisk at THIS LOCATION.
And if you missed it, check out “Lamb,” still streaming at Treble, at THIS LOCATION.
Dog will see release via Italy’s Bronson Recordings on CD, LP, and digital formats on October 20th in Italy and the rest of Europe and December 12th worldwide. The vinyl edition will be limited to 500 copies with 100 on marble wax and 400 on standard black. For CD preorders visit THIS LOCATION, for black vinyl go HERE, and for marbled vinyl go HERE.
For digital orders go HERE where you can also stream opening track “Banister.”
Small towns in the countryside are all obstinately the same wherever you go: loneliness, abjection, rage. From a godforsaken place, the volume abusers in ELM tell their tales with languages and images of the American Bible Belt; a land of obsessed preachers, and sleazy moralism; cradle of inveterate losers, and alienation.
On their new album Dog, ELM wanders places lost somewhere between reality and imagination; swamps and deserts where God is just a mere memory that leaves only a pale reflection, a dark and distorted echo that fosters the need for the absolute of irredeemable Sinners who live under the burden of their stories. They are stories from the darkest places of our society that nobody wants to tell; stories that need no judgement, where the outcasts end up unsurprisingly all in the same way; stories told through killer riffs and nasty plots by four respectable members of the community, who live the honest and relaxed small-town life.
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