If you’ve seen Ealdor Bealu live before, you know their shows are essentially mountainous post-metal rituals that quickly build to vintage prog primordial ecstasy. Sometimes that kind of power is hard to translate into an LP, but 2021’s Psychic Forms did a great job letting listeners know there was more under the hood than chunky riffs and philosophical pondering.
After five years the Boise band is back with Buried at Boot Hill, and after checking it out for the first time, the first thing that struck us is how much it felt like a functional mythology. This album’s story feels like it has a clear beginning and ending, retaining the power of their last album but expanding in ways that really let the listeners sink in.
The heavy psych banger “Ponderay” makes for a great 70’s-style prog appetizer, but the record’s scroll of mysticism starts to unfurl with “Abandoned to Decay.” Somewhere between Sleep and Kylesa, Ealdor Bealu spins a thread that feels mournful, magical, and real.
The instrumentation trades off more noticeably on this record, letting vocal parts feel more characteristic and varied. The exploration helps the riffs feel more like dynamic exposition and let’s the bass give the songs more overall momentum. “Mountain of Gold” is potentially our favorite example of how the band stretches narrative across a song – emotive acoustics build to a full band crescendo that had us thinking about records like Blood Mountain and Crack the Skye.
The same can be said for the title track, which actually had us thinking about the whole Mastodon discography in general. A number of those band’s records closed with something heartbreakingly pretty and jagged at the same time, and many have tried to follow in those footsteps but few have helped carry that torch into new territories like Ealdor Bealu.
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