Espers are an interesting study in folk music. Not really, folk in a traditional sense, the band take loads of quiet music and feeds it magic mushrooms in the hope of making something so hippified and trippy you can almost smell the patchouli. They've succeeded and truth be told, the third time is the charm for the Espers as their appropriately titled album, III, is probably their best yet. Draped in paisley, capes, and Indian boots, this group of troubadours strum their way across an atmospheric album that's the about starting fresh and making up for past mistakes...or so they say.
III is an enjoyable listen because the record simply sounds like it came from a different time. This is a record that although fueled by electricity and distortion, sounds as if it were beamed in from the Middle Ages. It's rustic, traditional, and exuberant and that's what makes this record of trippy folk tolerable. Espers take the template of what modern folk music is and sends it back a couple hundred years, processes it through a distortion pedal and then lets it go to wonder through the forest. Not really sounding like anyone else, Espers forge their own path on III and it's a path that we as music fans should follow. From the opening strums of "I Can't See Clear," to the tripped out bliss of, "That Which Darkly Thrives," III is a really cool album of folk music it's ok to like. Varied, weird, and lost in time, III proves the Espers are truly cut from a different cloth and that's what makes them and their records bunches of bizarre atmospheric fun.
No comments:
Post a Comment