Lindsey Markel Writes About True Things

It is fitting that Elsinore’s upcoming EP would be titled after their latest magnetic single, “Chemicals.” After building up a name and following, the Midwestern band spent the last few years trying to shed their stubborn “folk/Americana” label, and The Chemicals EP is their strongest case yet for destroying all labels completely.  “Chemicals” itself is either a rock song disguised as a love song, or vice versa. The song sparks with its own colorful energy, featuring an irresistible, soaring hook. It is clean and catchy, but hardly simple—after the bridge, it spirals into more sinister territory, feedback and electric buzzes echoing. So it is difficult enough to categorize the five tracks themselves (and why would you want to?)—they move seamlessly through shades of rock ‘n’ roll, shoegazey pop, and space rock. But it’s not hard to understand how or why Elsinore struggled to lose the folk clothes; their songs are full of heart, both emotionally and—especially on the new EP—literally. 

There is no way to write about Elsinore without writing about the titanic voice of their lead singer and guitarist, Ryan Groff. There is no way around his voice. It is an instrument. It is a tool. When the ancients decided to invent a word for “sing,” they were listening to someone with a voice like his, and it may have come before the word for “fire.” And here, he sings about your heart. About the air in your lungs, about your brain, muscles and tendons, “the water in your body.” The songwriting here has evolved multifold over the past few years, and songs like “Breathing Light” showcase the now fine-tuned lyricism present throughout the EP: “The blood that runs in my veins, it gets around/the water that makes up the rain, it only knows down/the trouble with communication’s that language gets in the way.” It’s playful, but still poetry. Regarding blood, water, language—simple, unconscious elements that are easily overlooked in the day-to-day. But the songs themselves are so beautiful and complex—moving seamlessly from sweeping and operatic to innocuously intimate—that they make their subjects loom. So the stuff of life—“the zeroes and ones,” “the chemicals inside your head”—are science, yes, and miracles nonetheless.  

The balance of technology and intimacy present on The Chemicals EP is a new direction for Elsinore, and it is used to lovely effect here. Several songs either conclude or are introduced by bleeps and bloops, yet this is also the first Elsinore release featuring scores of strings and horns. “Yes Yes Yes,” the title track to an upcoming album, is their first all-out dance track, and the EP remix by Eric Enger (of STL’s Gentleman Auction House) sprints with kinetic energy; it is invincibly addictive, with hooks a mile high. It might seem off-putting at first for dedicated fans to hear Groff accompanied by synth breaks, but by the time the song reaches its Beatles-esque conclusion, with horns bleating and choruses chanting, all hands will be firmly on deck. “Breathing Light” is one which opens almost ominously, with discordant beeping and electronic screeching, like a hundred small alarms sounding—and then an acoustic guitar comes in, and suddenly all the beeps and screeches are crickets chirping on a warm, Midwestern summer night. That’s the magic of Elsinore, and the appeal of this wondrous little EP: you put it on, and the fireflies come out.