ALBUM REVIEW: Peculiar – Elbe
Czech post-metal outfit ELBE began life as an instrumental project, a collaboration between guitarists Standa Jelinek and Martin Perina. After a couple of albums, the band has expanded, bringing in Jelinek‘s DYING PASSION bandmates Jan Kylar and Jan Stinka on drums and bass as well as Pavel Hrncir on vocals, moving away from their instrumental roots. Their third album, Peculiar, is the first with a full band – and curiously, with the addition of vocals after much of the music had been completed as instrumental pieces.
It’s an interesting decision to take, of which the vocal-less post metal origins are often evident. Take opening track and single Sen: it’s a slow-paced intro featuring multi-layered guitars, background effects, and persistent, mid-tempo drums. Its explosive escalation halfway through throws in the vocals – double-tracked growls and lower-register clean singing, sat atop the crashing cymbals and relentless guitar bends. It does re-contextualise the heavy release into something different, more introspective, though it feels more like a textural addition than a song of vocal intent.
This tension of the vocal additions to songs plays out throughout Peculiar. Some are more successful than others: Place To Die feels more intentionally crafted with space for the vocals, multi-tracked clean singing hooks atop a dissonant but major-inflected chorus riff that draws on late 90s hard rock. Hrncic’s vocals vary across the album, ranging from laconic lower-register keys to sandpaper growls. The latter is more evident in the rises and falls of Never Again, set against dissonant riff work. The basic nature of the lyrics sometimes works against the music as well. The repeated refrain of “Never again, nevermore” in the latter half of that song changes the expectations of the building motifs, crying out for a conclusion or transition space that instead just falls into a main section reprise with little fanfare.
The album features some nice moments scattered throughout. Both You & Me And The End and Before I Go are cut from similar cloth to Place To Die. The former is a more laid-back rock song with some shoegaze elements, drawing on the range of influences that inform ELBE. The clean guitar melodies that cut across the song are simple yet effective. Pedal effects dominate the closing stages of Before I Go, a nice textural point of difference. The dissonant escalations of Never Again and Place To Die hit hard from the distorted guitars, too. But the whole record lacks some heft, let down by flat production, consistently mid- to low-tempo pace, and a lack of variation. Those middle three songs work better as vocal-driven songs, but miss the distinguishing points of the more instrumentally driven fare.
The closing two tracks return to a more traditional post-metal base. Who Am I If Not Me leans hard into the tremolo guitar lines perennially associated with post-rock, effectively moving between dynamically distinct sections. Slow Down! leans hard into reverb-drenched lead guitar lines in its intro, distorted bass rising above the mix to add some new character in an effective dynamic build of layered instrumentation. The vocals only come in at the five-minute mark, another repeated refrain well-suited to close the album.
Peculiar feels like the work of a band rather than an instrumental guitar project, and credit must go to ELBE for successfully pulling off that transition. Yet it also feels like an album lacking a coherent approach. The addition of vocals works best when they’re deployed to enhance the core sound rather than replace it, as on Sen and Slow Down!. But the use elsewhere feels forced, insistent on being the primary component of songs that required significant compromise to make it work, without ever earning that game-changing status through their innate quality. Perhaps future efforts, starting intentionally as a five-piece, may find that sweet spot between the effective post-metal and doomgaze flourishes, with the singing integral to that sound. But Peculiar for now falls short of that goal.
Rating: 5/10
Peculiar is out now via Octopus Rising.
Follow ELBE on Instagram.