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Elephant Gym has spent several years making interesting and very different math rock. While most of the genre emphasizes a particular linear form based on guitar-led instrumental music, tapping not being required but merely suggested, KT Chang’s unique bass has anchored Elephant Gym in a way that sounds nothing like any of their contemporaries either in the US, the UK, or their more geographically proximate but sonically distinct Japan. With a set of EPs under their belts, and then a full length album, though, it takes Dreams to understand just how reaching their previous efforts were. This is the point at which the group releases a fully developed sound, which is not to say that those prior EPs nor their previous full length album, Underwater, were bad, but rather, this is cohesive in a way that those efforts were not.
The album begins with a set of jazz chords that are not unheard of in math rock (see, for example, Japan’s jizue, JYOCHO, or the keyboard-based mouse on the keys), but that have not been explored to any great extent by Elephant Gym, with a group having their studies more rooted in classical than in jazz. Yet from there, the group finds a more seamless synthesis of those math rock influences and even some of the now-common electronic elements that have become standard for math rock artists, kept both compositionally and perhaps somewhat improvisationally in check by a more balanced approach wherein the group is not incorporating disjoint elements merely because they can, or because they think they should, but as a piece warrants.
That is where Dreams differs from the group’s previous full length album, which was interesting and challenging, but not necessarily fully engaging. Dreams has a more complete sound, building on a more solid foundation of musical theory and only drawing on more modern elements when it benefits the piece rather than for the sake of appealing to a more modern fan base. Combine that with a more nuanced use of traditional Taiwanese folk on several tracks, and Dreams gives the listener a sense of the full scope of what the group can do, as opposed to the snippets from previous EPs, as impressive as they were.
This is what Elephant Gym has been striving to record.
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