ELFIN SADDLE - DEVASTATES (180 G LP)

Elfin Saddle Devastates on 180g LP + Download Code

Elfin Saddle deepens its compositional and conceptual agenda on Devastates, the band's third full-length album and its most urgent, ornate and impassioned work to date. The Montreal group, led by multi-instrumentalists Emi Honda and Jordan McKenzie (who also share vocal duties), has always shown a profound engagement with issues of environmental sustainability and the emotional impact of economic/political ideologies that continually foreclose on the possibility of genuine, progressive renewal and redirection. The band's music-making, and the parallel art practice on display in Honda and McKenzie's installation and video work, investigates the tensions between nature and technology on multiple levels. With Devastates, this is explicit in the lyrical narrative of the album as a whole and implicit in the band's use of found and re-purposed objects to create its soundworld.

The new abulm weds an operetta-style song cycle to an organic, junkshop aesthetic to great effect, forging a unique hybrid of folk music that weaves Honda's thrilling vocals (often singing in Japanese) and McKenzie's woodsy, unaffected baritone with threads of clattering steam-engine percussion, ukulele, accordion, glockenspiel and pump organ. The addition of Kristina Koropecki's cello alongside long-standing third member Nathan Gage on upright bass allows for a doubly melodic/rhythmic low-end.

Recorded in a small, abandoned chapel in rural Quebec, Devastates is intimate and humbly epic, anchored by a DIY aesthetic and fueled by the desire to say something both critical and hopeful about our common earthly trajectory. This is profoundly un-escapist and engaged folk music that avoids the obvious trappings of the folk traditions, grounding the listener in a sonic and narrative terrain that stakes out a highly original and distinctive definition of a protest song. 180g vinyl with a full color liner notes insert, screen printed art poster and download code.

Elfin Saddle Devastates Track Listing:

1. The Changing Wind
2. Kiboho
3. Boats
4. The Power & The Wake
5. Chaos Hands
6. Invocation
7. In A Blanket Of Leaves
8 The Wind Come Carry