Italian noise rock unit ELM will release their The Wait full-length on June 12th via Bronson Recordings.
“It’s a song about crime, punishment, and inevitability. Even if you try hard, everything can just go wrong. In lands ruled by men, innocence will always be cheated.” – ELM on “Kingsnake”
A raging display of manic urgency, the eleven track analog recording was captured by Paride Lanciani (Kash, Instrumental Quarter, Maniac Du Jour) and assisted by Alberto Costa, at Oxygen Recording Studios in Verzuolo, Cuneo, Italy in a week of retreat during the hottest summer ever. The state-of-the-art analog environment on the hills overlooking the flat land surroundings of Cuneo served as the ideal place for ELM to channel the mood of the songs into the tracks.
“We realized full-on aggression was not enough to convey the overall mood we were in with this record,” relays the band. “It was necessary to basically stretch out every element of our music to an absurd level where all is transfigured and reduced to a new sonic result: shinier, sharper, and cleaner. In an attempt to create a more uncomfortable overall mood, we cut off every unnecessary element to build up the required tension.”
Adds Lanciani of the recording,
“ELM is a band that has a very defined idea about their own sound. If listening to hardcore punk and metal excites you, you can’t miss this fucking band. Before rolling on tape, we afforded a deep research looking for each sound to preserve the real and natural band dimension, and I’m really satisfied with the result. Nothing has been manipulated in the studio. We worked to maintain as much as possible every single vibration. We made a strong and clean master tape with very few guitar overdubs and practically no editing. We didn’t use any computers, except a digital audio workstation for the mastering final step. It’s all analog. In the end, we got exactly what was expected of this session. I’m proud of this production and honored to have had ELM at Oxygen Studios.”
From the Fugazi feasting on Elvis’ corpse vibe of “44” and the Lightnin’ Hopkins covering Jizzlobber doom blues of “Believe Or Burn” to the neon-drenched breakdowns of “Whole Year Inn” and the spidery Entombed meets The Jesus Lizard riffing of “Kingsnake” and “Abattoir,” The Wait is truly something striking.
In advance of the release of The Wait, ELM is pleased to unveil first single, “Kingsnake,” noting,
“‘Kingsnake’ is inspired by William Faulkner’s Light In August, one of our favorite books by one of our favorite writers. No one could be so distant (in time and space) and nevertheless so close to our feelings. It’s a song about crime, punishment, and inevitability. Even if you try hard, everything can just go wrong. In lands ruled by men, innocence will always be cheated.”
The Wait will be released on CD, digital, and vinyl formats (limited to 300 orange translucent marble). For preorders go to THIS LOCATION.
Small towns in the countryside are all obstinately the same wherever you go: loneliness, abjection, rage. From a godforsaken place somewhere in Northern Italy, ELM relays their stories using languages and images of the American Bible Belt, a land of obsessed preachers and squalid moralism; the cradle of irredeemable alienation.
ELM manifests through sound visions of oil kings and preachers, hired killers and quiet neighbors appearing like ghosts on a pitch dark landscape made of old churches and dilapidated ballrooms, where one can smell the sopping moisture emanating from the swamplands at the edge of town. In this, you could plant your roots and just flash another suspicious look, unable to escape a descending spiral that could only end by splitting yourself in two. Yearning to find the perfect ground on which to set its stories of love, death, sex, hate, lust, violence, and God; at the crossroad between now and then; halfway amidst exploited clichés and stark reality; between Jim Thompson and Cormac McCarthy, as two sides of the same coin ELM welcomes you to the delightful Italian forsaken suburbs.
ELM is: Matteo Torterolo – vocals, Alessandro Martines – guitars, Andrea Meinero – bass, Giorgio Rita – drums.
