Elder Island an experimental oasis

Elder Island is an electropop band, I guess.

The British trio makes music from the expected electropop elements: beats, synths, loops, hypnotic vocals. These elements are tried and true for a reason (they worked magic from Yazoo to La Roux), but they can limit a band’s aesthetic. On Elder Islands debut LP, “The Omnitone Collection,” the basic building blocks of electropop provide the core of the group’s sound — a dreamy, dancy sonic world — but surprising flourishes and detours evoke everything from Chic to Eurythmics, Portishead to Sigur Ros.

Maybe Elder Island’s expansive view of the genre came about because everyone in the band — singer (and cellist) Katy Sargent and multi-instrumentalists Luke Thornton and David Havard — began miles from the sound of “The Omnitone Collection.” Thornton and Havard knew each other growing up and started messing around with punk rock and ska in their teens and actually reconnected via the internet and Arctic Monkeys.

“It was right when they were getting big and I saw Dave had put up some bass tabs of their songs,” Thornton said. “I asked, ‘Was it you who put up those tabs?’ He said he did and we rekindled our friendship from there.”

The pair ended up going to the same university and Havard lived in a house with Sargent. The roommates would have near-constant jam sessions and when they found out Sargent played cello they insisted she join in.

“Then one day I walked by her room and heard her singing and I told her she had to sing with us,” Thornton said.

The three ended up spending more time on music than school — the trio still spends an obsessive amount of time building songs from marathon jam sessions. But early on, Elder Island preferred folk tunes over synth washes and club beats.

“This was around the time of Mumford & Sons and everyone was getting into that sound,” Thornton said with a laugh. “As the three of us just worked with each other the sound began to change. We would lose ourselves in these sessions, learning how to use loops, and GarageBand, and figuring everything out together as we went.”

Over a series of singles and EPs, the band developed on its own, writing, recording and producing in its studio in Bristol. Things worked out well: See half a dozen tunes with 5 million plus spins on Spotify. But for “The Omnitone Collection,” Elder Island thought help might speed things along and asked Ali Chant (Portishead, PJ Harvey, Gruff Rhys) to produce at his studio Play Pen.

“The three of us had been going around in circles. Three minds that would pass things around, not getting closer to the end,” Thornton said. “We like Ali’s work and his studio reminded us of ours but on a grander scale. His was just glorious about microphones and drum kits and timpanis and synthesizers, and they’re all plugged in and ready to go. A lot of the little twinkles of sounds you hear on the album came from odd instruments we added with Ali.”

Even out on tour, Thornton says he’s eager to get back and start working out new stuff — whether that will be with Chant or as a trio, he’s not sure yet. He wants to get lost again in loops and beats and the new instruments the group keeps collecting.

“We don’t have a telly in our place so we have got to kill time somehow,” he said with a laugh. “That could be learning an instrument, wiring up a new piece of equipment, just experimenting for hours.”

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Elder Island, with Dirty Nice, at the Sinclair, Cambridge, Wednesday. Tickets: $16-$18; sinclaircambridge.com.

from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/2mINN8j