New Noise Magazine is currently streaming “Shell Of A Man,” the latest single from Italian noise rock unit ELM. The track comes off the band’s The Wait full-length set for release June 12th via Bronson Recordings.
Comments the band, “‘Shell Of A Man’ is a tale from the countryside, the place where we live: houses are clean and gardens are perfectly shaped, but you can feel the tension growing. You better stay in your shell and just watch life, outside, passing by. The image of a man living with a shell in his back has a strong bound with the art of David Cronenberg and his work about mutations of human body.”
A fully analog recording, ELM’s The Wait 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 recorded. 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 fully encapsulate the mood of the songs.
Each of The Wait’s eleven tracks tells a different tale, but in the end they are all an attempt to express a feeling; a feeling that something is coming… It’s just a matter of time — days, months, years maybe. But it’s definitely coming. What the “it” may be is still a mystery… so we toil on…and wait.
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 an expression of the human psyche. Something restless and looming…
The Wait will be released on CD, digital, and vinyl formats (limited to 300 orange translucent marbled).
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 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.
