ALBUM REVIEW: Seeing The Elephant – The Offering
We’re rapidly approaching the time of year where music journalists flood the internet with their Best Of lists. Seeing The Elephant is unlikely to top many of them, however it does have a good chance of winning 2022’s ‘Most Enthusiastic’ award. The second album from THE OFFERING is deliriously energetic, and the kind of record where you can almost hear them bouncing off the walls of a recording studio. It’s almost an hour of unhinged melodic metal, full of political commentary, tongue-in-cheek humour and rabid riffs. Listening to it is an absolute blast; it’s exhausting but it is loads of fun.
And much to the chagrin of sleep-deprived journalists desperately trying to meet a deadline, it’s difficult to pigeonhole. If we had to pin THE OFFERING down, we’d call them melodic death metal, but that doesn’t really capture what they are. At times they come across like America’s answer to AVATAR, and at others like SLIPKNOT with a better sense of humour, but they have elements of thrash, death and even indie worked into their sound.
So, on the one hand you’ve got balls-out, neck-wrecking tracks like Ghostmother and Rosefire which were clearly written with one eye on the pit. But on the other, you’ve got tripped out numbers like the title track that marry dark folk tones with achingly sad and poetic lyrics. Seeing The Elephant is an album where 30 songs have been crammed into ten, and you never quite know where it’s going to go next.
However, this doesn’t mean it always works. For example, Tiny Disappointments is an over-long semi-ballad that outstays its welcome long before it finishes, while Esther Weeps strives for greatness but doesn’t quite get it. This closing number comes within a whisker of being an epic finale, but at the exact point it should explode into life, it’s weirdly subdued.
Luckily, these are the exceptions and, for the most part, Seeing The Elephant is a riot. Flower Children is a cheerfully unhinged take on inter-generational feuding, while WASP is a massive opener akin to a seven-minute adrenaline shot. The fanatical performances from the four guys involved also disguise how much thought has gone into it. There’s a keen intelligence behind all these energy-drink powered freak outs.
Aside from a couple of missteps then, Seeing The Elephant is a wild ride. Super stardom is going to be a challenge, but they’ll quickly become cult heroes if they can maintain this chaotic momentum. Imagine a world where Hunter S. Thompson was a metalhead, his band would probably sound like this.
Rating: 7/10
Seeing The Elephant is out now via Century Media Records.
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