Elliott BROOD Mix Myriad Styles Alluringly On ‘Ghost Gardens’ (ALBUM REVIEW)

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With Ghost Gardens, Elliott BROOD continues to experiment with the myriad styles within its eclectic sound. This fifth album from the Canadian trio is a complex layering and melding of country, bluegrass, folk, and rock to form a musical tapestry that is equally beautiful and bleak.

The album-opening “’Til the Sun Comes Up Again” is a front-porch bluegrass stomper. The song sounds sad and cheerful at the same time. Mark Sasso’s raspy vocals sway over his up-tempo banjo picking and Casey Laforet’s jangling acoustic guitar. “Alone with the morning hours, sitting here with the busted flowers while you’re going on,” Sasso sings. Though the music is upbeat, Sasso’s voice carries the weight of loneliness and abandonment. As the title Ghost Gardens suggests, much of the album depicts desolation, estrangement, and perseverance.  Despite the feelings of abandonment, Sasso sings, “My heart always leads me to your door.”

The hook-laden hybrid track “2 4 6 8” showcases Elliot BROOD’s brilliant fusion of contrasting styles, with Laforet’s crunching distorted guitar giving an ominous presence despite Sasso’s breezy banjo. The chugging guitar, abruptly shifting tempos, and Stephen Pitkin’s drumming march the song forward, complemented by Sasso’s strained, angry vocals.

Though upbeat catchy songs like “2 4 6 8” and “Dig a Little Hole” stand out the most, Ghost Gardens is predominantly slow and soft. There’s a bit less eccentricity and more restraint from Elliott BROOD this time around. The quieter moments allow the music to breathe and there is a lot of nuance to appreciate in these melodies, layers of instruments, and songwriting. The subtle swelling bass and reverb-soaked vocals of “The Fall” paint a somber mood. Similarly, the sparse instrumentation of “T.S. Armstrong” emphasizes the song’s emptiness. “We spread out in lines and combed through the fields in search of the girl who disappeared,” Sasso sings, the song sounding as distant and hopeless as the picture Sasso paints.

Most of the songs on Ghost Gardens are at least a decade in the making. The band recently discovered an old abandoned hard drive filled with demos of songs that never made it onto previous albums. The trio then went to the studio and reworked many of the songs, in some cases changing or adding to the arrangements. As such, the album is oddly vintage Elliott BROOD and new Elliott BROOD at the same time. Of course, with this band, an odd juxtaposition like that is perfectly normal.

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