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Queen Elephantine, Gorgon: Turn to Stone

queen elephantine gorgon

As a creative unit, Queen Elephantine seem to take particular delight in contrasting ritual and experimentalism. Nomadic in geography and decreasingly so but still somewhat amorphous in contributors around founder/guitarist/vocalist Indrayudh Shome and drummer-of-long-standing Nathanael Totushek — though percussionist/vocalist Matthew Becker, Tanpura player/sometimes guitarist Srinivas Reddy, and vocalists Ian Sims and Samer Ghadry (who’ve also handled percussion and guitar, respectively, in the past) have become something of a steady presence — the group which in its latest incarnation is based at least on Shome‘s part in Philadelphia also includes bassist Camden Healy and returning guitarist Brett Zweiman, as well as synth from former Elder drummer Matt Couto, present Gorgon on Argonauta Records and Atypeek Music. It is the sixth Queen Elephantine full-length and arrives following Kala (review here), which was their label debut on Argonauta in 2016. With it come four extended tracks that hearken to the contrast noted in the outset: “Mars” (13:02), “Unbirth” (9:59), “To See Eyes” (10:12) and “Mercury” (10:14). It is by no means the band’s first consort with mythology and extended forms, and after 2013’s Scarab (review here) saw them discover a more dronely, meditative course, Kala pushed further just as Gorgon does once again.

So how can a band be both reliable and unpredictable? Easy: they’re reliably unpredictable. You never really know going into a Queen Elephantine record what you’re going to get, but you can rest assured it’s not going to sound like anything else, and sure enough, Gorgon doesn’t. Even as, with multiple singers at play throughout much of it, adding to the overarching droned-out feel, Gorgon is perhaps Queen Elephantine‘s most Swansian outing up to this point in their career, it’s also singly their own, basking in an identity that comes through Shome‘s own lo-fi production (Billy Anderson mastered) and willful abandonment of traditional verse/chorus structure in favor of songcraft as an outward linear journey, an absolute going that doesn’t so much actively try to return as to follow a drifting and sometimes tidal-feeling pattern, surging and receding, ebbing and flowing, building, crashing, rolling out again. Even in their most straightforward early work, Queen Elephantine have never been a particularly accessible band. Their material is always challenging, and reliable in being more concerned with its own expression and journey than with a given listener’s ability to keep up or with placating an audience.

That very much remains true on Gorgon, as “Mars,” which is both opener and longest track (immediate points) opens with waves of drone and the eventual arrival of a chanting vocal pattern that will return throughout much of the album as it unfolds. These wails become an essential part of the record’s character, and one assumes it’s ShomeSims and Ghadry together singing out. On “Mars,” they’re surrounded by winding lead guitar, live-sounding drums and at least two layers of synth/drone, so there’s no shortage of things happening, yet with the rawness of production there’s still something minimal about the proceedings that would seem to have carried over from pieces of Kala and more particularly Scarab before Gorgon. The rhythmic guitar of “Unbirth” seems to join the percussive march happening and is willfully, almost defiantly, repetitive — also a significant source of the Swans comparison above — but builds to as close to a wash as I’ve ever heard from Queen Elephantine, psychedelic and immersive with the forward rush of synthesizer and the fragmentation of that guitar line, which morphs and readjusts itself into a different plod, all the more resolved with resurgent vocals overtop. But it’s with “To See Eyes” that the more minimalist feel comes through, and particularly in the second half, which isn’t by any means leaving empty space, but in the setup for a guitar freakout to come, departs for a minute or two into a vast dronescape that is little short of breathtaking.

QUEEN ELEPHANTINE

And when the guitar kicks back in after the seven-minute mark, well, you’ll know it when you hear it. Noise ensues, and what construction there was — and I don’t doubt there was some, even if it was steadfast in its refusal to follow familiar patterns — is pulled apart. I haven’t had the benefit of a lyric sheet to guess at themes or anything like that — often the chants seem more intended to add to the overarching atmosphere than to deliver a pointed message, but perhaps that’s my own misinterpretation — but there are no words as “To See Eyes” bleeds directly into “Mercury” anyhow, the nodding finisher picking up with a more active and plodding progression, guitar and synth adding to the liquefied feel of the outward processional. A noisy solo takes hold and a clear verse emerges from it after three minutes in as patterns are established in the ethereal, which can only mean that departure isn’t far off. Sure enough, Queen Elephantine are soon embroiled in the greater reaches of Sonic Elsewhere, though there’s something particularly grungey about the guitar tone as they go. In psychedelic ritual fashion, they once again pull the track apart at the seams, but this time reemerge from the noise with a verse and final build to a crescendo paying off Gorgon as a whole before giving over to a last burst of feedback.

Isn’t it time to start calling Queen Elephantine jazz? Are we there yet? Much as the gorgons turned those who gazed upon them into stone — the most famous, of course, being Medusa — Gorgon‘s own conversation with immortals would seem to have more to do with Alice Coltrane than Ancient Greece, at least from a sonic standpoint. It’s easy enough to get why they’re underappreciated. True experimentalists often are by a wider audience. But in terms of style and forward-thinking expressive and ambient weight, Queen Elephantine stand apart now and have for some time from those who one might otherwise consider their peers, and as they exist between worlds of the heavy underground and the avant garde, it seems all the more apparent how laudable and unbending their commitment to their own continued growth is. Is it indulgent? Oh yeah. Most definitely. Gorgon isn’t easy listening by any stretch, and even at a manageable 43 minutes, it can feel grueling in the reaches of “Unbirth” or the near-violent deconstruction of “To See Eyes,” but it’s not meant to be easy — on you as a listener or on them as artists. It is meant to exist in that perpetual contradiction between ritual and experiment, taking the familiar and reshaping it into something almost unrecognizable. I wouldn’t dare to predict Queen Elephantine‘s future, where they might go from here in sound or otherwise, but that ethic is at their core, and it seems only fair to expect it to stay there for as long as they’re a band. So be it.

Queen Elephantine, Gorgon (2019)

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Argonauta Records website

Atypeek Music website

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