100 Greatest Songs of the 2010’s #69 Elder – Sanctuary

Released : 2017

Every so often an album comes along that so transcends it’s genre that it seems even the artists are surprised. Boston four piece Elder had barely hinted at the majesty of their fourth album Reflections of a Floating World in previous work, but it’s remarkable playability lay in vastly dynamic, shape shifting threads, songs-within-songs that left the simple “Metal” tag far behind in an alternate dimension.

Sanctuary is hardly evidence of a band who want to deceive outsiders by sequencing their side 1, track 1 as the most open; it’s over eleven minutes long and combines elements of prog, stoner and traditional rock, undulating over a number of courses whilst rejecting the theatrics that can sometimes prompt an unintentional shift from the extreme to the theatrical. In a time when the phrase epic is applied to almost everything, this is the sound of a remote genre stepping into the light, with awesome results.