Album Review: Lowrider & Elephant Tree, The Long Forever Split LP
Posted in Reviews on October 25th, 2024 by JJ Koczan
[Full disclosure up front: this split was released as part of Blues Funeral Recordings’ PostWax subscription vinyl series. I wrote the liner notes accompanying that and the regular edition and was compensated for it. Rest assured I’d be writing about it regardless, but it needs to be said, so it’s said.]
Being a fan of both bands, it’s hard not to be swept up in the sense of Elephant Tree and Lowrider‘s The Long Forever as an event. Issued first through Blues Funeral Recordings‘ vinyl subscription series PostWax, the LP runs a relatively tidy seven songs and 44 minutes from Lowrider‘s antifascist treatise “And the Horse You Rode in On” and closer “Long Forever” on Elephant Tree‘s side, and between the two, each band offers a distinctive glimpse at their sound. Lowrider are growing more progressive, lush and melodic as portrayed by “Caldera” and “Into the Grey,” while “And the Horse You Rode in On” and the collaborative centerpiece “Through the Rift” should please riffy loyalists, and Elephant Tree find new gnarl to bring to their lush and melodic style. The narrative — blessings and peace upon it — will inevitably center largely around Jack Townley of Elephant Tree, whose near-fatal bike accident in 2022 and weeks-long coma that inspired the title, but the fact of the matter is that prior to the advent of this split, both bands were at a crucial point in their respective tenures.
For Lowrider, The Long Forever is the Swedish four-piece’s first release since 2020’s Refractions (review here), which landed as a two-decades-later follow-up to their first album, 2000’s Ode to Io (reissue review here), and was a landmark. My pick for best album of 2020 and the winner of the year-end poll, Refractions felt like a secret being revealed, as though Lowrider had been a band the entire time, working, living, growing in sound, while still retaining essential facets of character from the debut. Already once in their career, the band have done the seemingly impossible in answering back to genre-defining release with something broader, fuller, more realized, and better, while not undercutting their own prior accomplishments.
Elephant Tree‘s Habits (review here) was my number-two pick for 2020 for the way it expanded on their 2016 self-titled (review here, discussed here), which without question was among the most standout heavy rock LPs of the 2010s and an immediate source of influence for other acts that continues to resonate. Habits took it all up a level — the songwriting, the atmosphere, the harmonies between the aforementioned Townley and bassist Peter Holland, the progressive scope and passionate poise with which the material was delivered. The band in 2024 celebrate 10 years since the release of their debut, Theia (review here), and one would be remiss to not look at The Long Forever as emblematic of their continued forward progression.
Pressure, then. Two bands under pressure to deliver something substantial, something honest, heavy in sound and forward-looking in point of view. Not about what they’ve done before but about what each still has to say.
To be perfectly honest, it will probably be a few years yet before The Long Forever can be properly appreciated on its own merits of craft and the complementary styles between the two groups being inevitably emphasized, but if taken as an album it is the best one of 2024 without question. In its finished form, it feels complete in a way few releases ever get to, let alone releases with more than one band involved, with the easy immersion of “And the Horse You Rode In On” — almost tragically catchy as you walk through the grocery store singing, “Fuck you and the horse you rode in on” — opening wide into “Caldera,” the 10-minute sprawl of which builds on Lowrider‘s longform triumph in “Pipe Rider” from Refractions but is more directed, less of a jam, and which conjures its melody in the vocals of bassist Peder Bergstrand early before departing into a hypnotic midsection, returning around a memorable surge and languid wash.
That wash in “Caldera” proves important in tying the two sides together, so keep it in mind. The subsequent Lowrider cut “Into the Grey” is a riffer, lumbering early on and jamming later (dat solo), but keeping the vocal emotionalism of the song prior, and “Through the Rift,” in bringing together the two bands — Elephant Tree is guitarist/keyboardist John Slattery and drummer Sam Hart in addition to Townley and Holland; Lowrider‘s returning lineup is Bergstrand, lead guitarist/vocalist Ola Hellquist, guitarist Niclas Stålfors and drummer Andreas Eriksson — is a moment unto itself, feeling somewhat short with a sub-four-minute run, but with a resonant hook that carries smoothly into Elephant Tree‘s three-song side B, which begins with “Fucked in the Head.”
After a minute and a half or so of dream noise, “Fucked in the Head” howls guitar over a fluid sleepy roll and Townley‘s first vocals enter, breathy in a way not entirely unlike Bergstrand‘s delivery, backed by a roiling psychedelia. A march emerges after four minutes in, but the shimmer becomes blinding and the slow movement continues about 6:15 into the nine-minute piece, which is patient through the crescendo that reignites the wash of Lowrider‘s “Caldera” before receding back into distant, obscure noise. The message here is one of impressionism bolstered all the more through a stripped-down production sound, as well as of the band being able to put the listener in the coma with them through the layering of different ambient elements.
Neither “4 for 2” or the relatively brief “Long Forever” are as ambitious in construction, but the former makes an effective shift to the semi-terrestrial by setting the band’s familiar fuzzy plod before the vastness of “Fucked in the Head.” Holland takes the lead vocal and the sway holds firm, and as they move into the noisy finish, this rawer but accomplished vision of Elephant Tree brings to mind Theia without trying to be a throwback. They are braver and more solidified than they were a decade ago and the songs bear that out. I never actually saw a lyric sheet for “Long Forever,” but it sounds like they’re repeating “free handbags” (which I don’t think they are, but is kind of fun) after the last buried verse and a harmonized solo, and the last build of which that’s part resolves once again with the wash that first showed up in “Caldera” and which both bands have been working around all along, and just two beeps from the hospital machine that goes “bing” and, apparently, means you’re still alive.
Be glad you are while music like this is being made.
Lowrider, “And the Horse You Rode in On” official video
Elephant Tree, “Long Forever” official video
Elephant Tree & Lowrider, The Long Forever (2024)
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