For Elephant Moon’s latest single, “Good Medicine,” the Nassau and Palmer reared back in a good way into stillness, intimacy and truth. At a brisk 2:37, it’s a concentrated shot of atmospherics that demonstrates, once again, that less can be more.
Recorded live in one take, “Good Medicine” leads off as the album does, with close-miked acoustic guitar fingerpicking and feels immediately intimate, you are essentially right there in the room with Shires. It is an honesty in the presentation that raw, unvarnished in the best sense of the term, suggests something of presence’s magic and gleaming impossibility.
The track thickens out from there but doesn’t actually get all that much thicker, there’s a roomful of whispering, grieving violin strings from Barbara Bartz who steps in and out of the acoustic space of the song, each step leaving sadness-behind and hope-in. Meanwhile, David Villanueva’s bass rumbles underneath, providing warmth and grounding, the guitar-and-violin foundation given a counterweight to keep it steady from fragility. It’s all of these textures together that makes “Good Medicine” one that persists though the final note has passed into thin air ages ago.
Where many tunes are trying to be grand and stretched out, Elephant Moon is short in its approach which in turn is where the genius of the track lies. The brevity reflects the subject: the now. “Good Medicine” is the here and now, stock-taking when you are still enough to feel something deep without distraction.
With just one follow-up to the debut, ”Where Were You,” Elephant Moon present themselves as an artist not appalled to employ vulnerability or simplicity in pursuit of something a little more timeless. It’s music for people desperate for sincerity, aural evidence that the right medicine isn’t always loud or big but plain and true.
The single “Good Medicine” is worth checking out. It’s raw, stripped back honesty buried beneath a swirling psyche of haunting instrumentals. Elephant Moon has produced something that could be seen as a hymn: simply to remind you how beautiful it was to have been present at the time.
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