Originally written by Ross Main.
“Attention Ladies and Gentleman, please bear witness to this phenomenal all natural mixture. Good for man or beast. A cure to what ails you. Never before have so many ingredients been brought together to form such a soothing concoction,” pitches the sinisterly monocled peddler, moments before Maryland’s Admiral Browning chug down the first swig of their Magic Elixir.
Basically instrumental from now on in, opening oddity “Vortexer” is a rumbling stroke through demented fuzzy flavors, exploring everything between a bouncy rock tempo to the slow motion faints of 10 b.p.m., guitars tuned to Z with the San Andreas Fault on bass. Wriggly unthemed guitar lines spice up the doom-laded slabs of sluggery, like Mastodon rockin’ it backwards over Candlemass; only beginning to set any sort of tone for this bizarre audio potion.
As the second track “Ol’ Martini Man” progresses further under the influence of a foreign substance, with the tonal aesthetics of Stoner Rock, but the into-action tempo of a hippy drill sergeant, it becomes clear pretty quickly that this is an album exercising very little boundaries and adheres to no rules whatsoever; only beginning to set any sort of tone for this sporadic musical medicine.
The pleasingly disjointed and unharmonious mess that is “No Good Stories” follows with a shortened length southern-fried acoustic mash that brings them back to their hanging-out-with-Ravi-Shankar phase. It’s beautiful, but threatens to rewire your brain if you listen too closely; only beginning to set any sort of tone for these weird tasting sound waves.
By now it’s obvious this record can only be dissected on a track-by-track basis, but crossing the line just under the half hour mark makes “Speaking in Tones” the final (and most sizeable) piece; not including a pretty rough and jammy modern-day-Hendrix hidden track. Admiral Browning conclude by taking the pace down for a bass-conducted 10,000 Days atmosphere before falling into some wilder but more conventional – sometimes harmonized – riffing and classic-styled soloing that explore the multi-textured tones of Matt LeGrow’s guitar inside and out.
A fairground of rusty demons and head-banging angels, the peddler was right; never before HAVE so many ingredients been brought together to form such a soothing concoction. You should feel ill at ease with the distorted circus of free thought one dose of this album will take you to, but you won’t. Instead you’ll go back for more, revisiting to find new things that make you feel at home outside of your own head… and that’s only beginning to set any sort of tone for this. This Magic Elixir.
