Elder - Reflections of a Floating World

I already have expressed twice my, as some might attest, unsavory opinion of Mastodon (although I don’t dislike them or their music, I just think they’re wildly overrated) when I wrote about Emperor of Sand and generally preferring Baroness over them. Reflections of a Floating World only further reinforces the former of those two opinions. This album is so much of what I love about both Mastodon and Baroness and yet another incredible example of why I think the metal world is and has given unfairly unbalanced praise for Mastodon as legendary innovators of sludge metal, despite their inconsistent and lackluster output as of late, while ignoring the equal if not greater merits of their contemporaries. Anyway, I don’t want to bog this down in Mastodon talk or make my elevation of this album one done at the expense of Mastodon, but the context had to be stated and the comparison had to be made. Moving on. Elder have written a real monster of a sludgy, psychedelic album, a mission often approached lazily in the song-writing department by most of the bands that regularly make this kind of music, with more effort placed on making the music embody the two aforementioned adjectives. Elder on the other hand have done the same, but kept their focus sharp on compositions, the album opener, “Sanctuary”, a brilliant epic with big sludgy riffs and vocals with levels of power comparable to John Bazley of Baroness that march through the heavens in perfect harmony. The long instrumental sections on this song, and much of the others, remind me of Baroness’ Blue Record. The longest song on the album “Blind” kicks into possibly the punchiest, dirtiest riff on the album after its reverb-y guitar intro and it takes a number of intriguing detours into moody piano-led, and Blue Record-like sludge sections, possibly my favorite song on the album. I don’t want to give away the whole plot, but the record keeps this up pretty much all the way until the end, which kind of presents the album’s biggest weaknesses. For all the tangents the songs take, tempo changes seem to come rarely and minimally, for one thing, and, as even the best sludge metal albums do too, the intensity of the riffing across the album is not very dynamic even as the song structures are. When the distorted guitars are there, they’re really there and they hit as hard as they’re supposed to, and once they’re off, they’re just a few little psychedelic swells that keep the album from being too quiet. “Sonntag” makes for a needed period of smoothness after four bulldozing sludge-fests, though and provides a nice eight and a half minutes of just psychedelia and guitar fiddling. I might also point out that the drumming could be a little more exciting across much of the album. Again, this album is excellently written and Elder have taken themselves a few notches up with it and possibly gotten the attention of some of the people fixated on Mastodon.