Following the departure of drummer M.K. for health reasons, E-L-R refocused on the original duo – bassist I.R. and guitarist S.M. – with the pair sharing vocal duties. Should this be seen as the catalyst that transformed Atropa into an album about transformation, illness, survival and change? That's what its promotional material suggests, hinting at a darker direction for the two Swiss musicians.
There is indeed something anxious about the way this third album begins, with the breath that precedes Oaken Reaper’s hypnotic and intense riffs, whose heaviness grabs you by the throat right from the start. No technical showboating, no display of virtuosity, just a few chords repeated in a loop to plunge us into a mystical atmosphere haunted by the echoes of the two voices answering one another in a mist of reverberations. The result, which is truly beautiful, is akin to a eulogy and opens Atropa with a pronouncement of doom: just as certain as the poison of the belladonna (the plant whose genus, Atropa, lends its name to this album) will take effect, just as certain as the arrow shot at first glance at the artwork will hit its target. And so we find ourselves suspended for the duration of the listening experience, still alive but for a time that will not last.
It is in this elusive moment that E-L-R brings time to a standstill, captivating us with its melancholy and its poetry, woven from subtle nuances and bittersweet surges (Archeress, which could almost have veered towards post-punk, lets a rather cruel light shine through). These contemplations are disrupted by torment, a palpable anxiety that regularly shakes Atropa, as evidenced by the traces of black metal on Solace Tracery, without, however, shattering the mystical essence of the whole. For Atropa does indeed have the air of a spell, a mass, a prayer in which the voices of the living and the spectre-like blend together, indistinguishable, both in the hushed mysteries of Cobalt Wound – to which Wolvennest's Shazzula lends her characteristic solemn delivery – and in the incantations of Saltwinds, a cathartic procession whose weight grips you in the gut.
E-L-R always has this talent for immersing us in a bubble of shadows and emotions, offering us a space conducive to introspection, a fragment of eternity that the ten minutes of Echo Space still attempt to freeze in time – an atmospheric, twilight-like conclusion that eventually swells into a painful outpouring that sounds like a farewell. In their explorations, E-L-R are now more elusive, more spectral than on the highly physical Vexier, yet they also bring us back to something more human than the cosmic reveries of their previous album. Atropa is a beautiful album on which to breathe one’s last and linger a little longer in the balance between life and death, just long enough to cast one last glance back before plunging into the unknown.
