innerspaceboy

Eternal Elysium - Spiritualized D

This album served as my introduction to stoner metal, though I’ve attended a few shows of my friend’s stoner drone band which is along a similar line with some additional electronic treatments. The opening track was eye-opening in that I’d expected a really muddy, lo-fi production quality but this record was surprisingly well-produced.

I approached the record with a degree of negative anticipation, confessedly judging a book by its cover. The album art employs both Edward Benguiat’s Scorpio typeface, (later knocked off as the freeware “Hippy.ttf”), and Peace Solid by Leslie Cabarga - the face iconically associated with every major Fillmore poster of the 1960s. The band clearly wished to stylistically align themselves with a particular era, and it is one replete with less-than-stellar retro throwback recordings. I’ve enjoyed Rochester’s Giant Panda Guerilla Dub Squad, who impressively topped the Billboard charts as mainstays of the reggae scene, but that’s about as close as I get to rehashing the 60s. That said, I was pleasantly surprised to have my caution dispelled by Spiritualized D as the album played on.

As an outsider to heavy psyche and doom metal, I can’t speak intelligently about the album quantitatively with regard to its genre, but I can say that I enjoyed it as an introduction to the scene. Some of the vocal treatments were intriguing, the guitarwork was energetic, and the rhythms were surprisingly uptempo as I’d expected sludgy, dirge-like structures. (Not that that would have been a bad thing.) I also enjoyed the curious atmospheric treatments sprinkled throughout the album, like the opening of “Innocent Exile” - a track with quite a solid groove to it.

Overall, enjoyable, surprising, and a bit of welcome education for this listener.

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