Espers - 'Espers' (Wichita)
4/5
By: Toby L
Things have to change if they are to stay relevant. Ideas have to evolve if they're to stay idealistic. It's called progress. There's a place for tradition, but only really if it's willing to keep up.
Espers, we hope, would agree. Going on the sound of their eponymous debut, they'd be fools to argue. Their roots are quite clearly grounded in acoustic folk and sixties psychedelia, but their gaze is fixed anywhere but, and rarely stays focused on the same concept for very long. And so they take their traditions and primary designs, twist and thrust them in to shapes and locations they'd otherwise never have come across and arrive with something that surpasses merely being relevant and borders on brilliance.
Even when the sound isn't particularly pioneering, there's still an otherworldly curiousness to everything that goes on, a difficult to pinpoint alternative to most things you'll ever have witnessed. Wonderful songs, too - haunting, lilting, mysterious pieces delivered in soft, reverent tones by twin balladeers Greg Weeks and Meg Baird. Far from soothing, in fact in times much closer to unsettling, it's beautiful but contains some danger in its ether. Things such as 'Meadow' and 'Flowery Noontide' might indeed come under the most hippy titles this side of Woodstock, but if love is in the air, it's of a distinctly disquieting sort - each player in this curiously inviting opening duo is easily capable of putting the willies up you on a quiet, foggy evening.
But when the sound is out there, it's barely on the radar. 'Riding' maintains a similarly placid theme, but its gently plucked steel strings are overlaid with an utterly mental, directionless but grandly stimulating dual guitar single note battle whose constant twists and turns lead you to wonder, without even wishing the following to be the case, whether its ever going to end. Though however grand that may be, it's the epic 'Hearts and Daggers' which really showcases the full scope of ideas in the Espers cannon, eight and half consistently invigorating minutes of futuristic folk interspersed with sections of subtle, screeching noise which culminates in flutes, guitars and erratic violin stabs all vying for ear-time simultaneously in a cacophony of delightful, uneasy freeform sound.
And from that point, there's no stopping them. Everything you think you've got a reference point for becomes mutated, underlined by gently throbbing synthesised bass and accentuated with twinkling clamour as on 'Byss & Abyss' or the ridiculously dense mulch of 'Travel Mountains', which sounds like the Jesus and Mary Chain covering the Fairport Convention. The one moment of joviality comes in the three minutes of the playfully penultimate 'Daughter', but here you excuse the lack of the eccentricity that you've come to expect due to that fact that it's such a pretty tune.
Tradition is a wonderful thing, but without its surroundings constantly, even slightly changing it becomes mundane and eventually forgotten. 'Espers' not only serves as a reminder of the glories of the past, but of the possibilities it opened up for us that have been, until now, criminally under explored.
Artists in this article: Espers
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