Queen Elephantine @ AllThatIsHeavy Store
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OFFICIAL PAGE: HTTP://QUEENELEPHANTINE.CLFRECORDS.COM
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“The music has a meditative space sound, like a solarized wind calmly blowing on an alien planet, or a brace of Tibetan monks on PCP, glued to their prayer mats and ommm-ing themselves to oblivion... There's plenty of galactic bliss on this disc, and plenty of underlying dread as well." - Hellride Music
"The elephant trudges on and on, devastating everything in its path..." - Sludge Swamp
“This is doom rock and its brooding, soul-stripping best.” - Hong Kong Magazine
“Young psychedelic rock masters... It will blow your head off." - Doom-sludge.com
"An ocean of quicksand riffs and the dense fog of distortion… Queen Elephantine create a solid sound that's all their own." - Antimusic.com
"An absolutely blissful place to get lost in for an hour or three... Like Floyd without the legacy." - HK Underground
"So heavy that I couldn't wear headphones while I was listening caus it would be hard to hold my head up... really new and fresh." - ProgNotFrog
"It crosses that barrier from music into experience..." - Stonerrock.com forums
ON SURYA:
Deaf Sparrow Zine
This is a great record. And in the methodical, stellar, emotional and astral plane, Surya is to me as good as Om’s latest Pilgrimage. It is also rougher, less detailed, choppier, looser, more rustic, more excessive, fatter, and longer. Surya drones spliff in hand and entrances in a deeper and more monotonous fashion, but with that approach it also holds you tighter to its bass-centric core. For the whole duration of Surya, this New York quartet (that’s where they reside but Queen Elephantine came together in Hong Kong) seems to channel the post Sleep mantra of Al Cisneros and the guitar tonalities of a pubescent Josh Homme. Of the first one they have taken (some might say stolen, but this is good so fuck it) the sense of jamming, the free flowing vibe that carries good stoner doom outside of rock parameters, and from the latter they have taken the exact tuning (especially during the solos) that made of Kyuss’ such legends. Queen Elephantine have studied the stuff, and as premeditated as Surya may be, the 5 songs that comprise it are a plain lesson on how to bend two or three notes into innumerable shapes.
Surya is massive in all fronts; recorded in the land of Jackie Chan it serves to its advantage that its lo fi qualities add a timeless warm tone to the whole recording. Wise move, as that sound adds to the band’s fat ass bottom. And it needs the weight as the songs extend over ten, and in the case of “Bison” , the thirty minutes. These tunes are at times insisting and moving at others groovy and always psychedelic.
If they stay together, Queen Elephantine might have a great future. Not sure how old these guys are, but pictures on their MySpace present a teenage looking quartet. And a generous one at that; while they are recording their new album (Kailash) Queen Elephantine is offering a two-song EP for free download at their MySpace page. Yeah, it’s two songs and together they total over forty minutes so no whining allowed.
Organ Magazine
ALBUM OF THE WEEK
QUEEN ELEPHANTINE – Surya (Self release) - Brooding moody slowly evolving dark doomy psychedelia and excommunicated standing stones waiting for the sun to rise as red as dragon eyes. Aural fornication, astral mastication and meditative space rock that sounds more like it came from just before the Summer Solstice morning at a Stonehenge free festival than the place is actually comes from. They’re from New York City and we’re eight minutes in to a rather impressive sixteen minute epic and you know what? I’m not sure if they sound like anything or anyone we’ve heard before. A far more enlightened and organic Sleep maybe? A hint of Acid Mother Temple? Birds like you’ve never seen before (like that time walking back to the stones just after Hawkwind when those six or seven guys in black hoods with great big axes on their shoulders walked past going the other way and no one gave them a second look). Incantations and moons pulling, meditative brooding and trudging along in such a upliftingly sludgy way. A dense smoky fog of soothing distortion and repetitive progression, lysergic delight and a slow sludge of spiritual warmth and middle Eastern organic goodness and hurry on sundown, see what tomorrow brings... Played just right, droned just right, spot on drums, spot on minimal bass rumble that opens the fifth track - a twenty seven minute brood called Bison. Spot on everything - highly recommended.
Stonerrock.com
Best described as a sprawling psychedelic space jam, Surya is the full-length debut of Queen Elephantine and a crushingly impressive follow-up to recent split-albums with Sons of Otis and Elder. Queen Elephantine's formidable contributions to those records were weighty works themselves, but a mere sampling of what they could do on their own. Surya's five tracks stretch out to over an hour, as the band lives up to its name and presents a perfect soundtrack to the unwieldy march of a mystical elephant caravan across the celestial plains. They melt down the sounds of Black Sabbath, Sleep, Hawkwind, Pink Floyd, early Monster Magnet, and a variety of other influences into a cosmic swamp all their own, populated by droning numbers like the self-titled lead off track and lumbering epics such as the 16-and-a-half-minute "Ramesses II," which rumbles along almost religiously with its chanted lyrics and smoky atmosphere until the pace picks up for its swirling climax.
The Middle Eastern influence of the instrumental "Kabir" provides a trippy interlude before "Plasma Thaw" swings in on a monstrous groove reminiscent of the usual suspects from the '70's and doesn't let up, definitely the catchiest song on the album. "Bison" closes the record at a mammoth 27 minutes and 24 seconds, an expansive sonic journey that never gets boring or monotonous. The layers upon layers of hypnotic rhythms and molasses riffs, enhanced by the jammed-out feeling throughout Surya should please fans of bands like Sons of Otis, Mammatus, Acid Mothers Temple, Ufomammut, and Om. The band is still in search of a record label to release the album as a physical entity, rather than its current digital format, but Queen Elephantine won't be denied for long as they continue their trek to the throne of heavy space-rock royalty.
Hellridemusic.com
Queen Elephantine is a group of young explorers in the world of heavy psychedelia, and 'Surya' is their first full-length, coming hot on the heels of various split releases and such in the past year or two. 'Surya' is a long, contemplative trip into the world of inner visions, a journey in which the devotional merges with the visionary to stake out a unique corner of the musical underground.
'Surya' begins with 'Queen Elephantine,' a lurching, meditational drone with plenty of heavy, distorted bass; a recipe the group uses to its advantage throughout the album. The song builds very slowly, offering visions that are somehow relaxed yet filled with anxiety, bringing to mind a space voyage with a crash landing on a far planet, where the alien sands drift quietly over blurry shapes both bizarre and sinister. 'Ramesses II' is a desert mirage of jerky military rhythms and monks offering devotional chanting that builds into the wails of lost souls. 'Plasma Thaw' is more rawkin', while the 27+ minute 'Bison' is as thunderous as its namesake, with leaving-the-rails blues-based thrashing reminiscent of English cult doom/sludge outfit Ramesses. This tune pushes Queen Elephantine territory out further, with various plodding sludgy riffs creating a claustrophobic blues hell colonized by nasty Tibetan demons of every description.
Lovers of heavy psychedelic doom or drone as manifested by groups as wide-ranging as Sleep, Acid Mother's Temple, Mammatus, YOB, and even 'Saucer'-era Floyd should climb aboard with these young musicnauts. It's not a comfortable or easy trip by any means, but it will reward your (lysergic) attention.
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Queen Elephantine have shared the stage with Earthride, Solace, Pale Divine, Admiral Browning, Black Pyramid, Ichabod and many others.
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