Elfpower

I saw Elfpower a few years ago opening for Neutral Milk Hotel, who are friends of theirs in the Elephant 6 artist collective back in hometown Athens, GA (also including folks like the Olivia Tremor Control, Secret Square, the Music Tapes, and numerous others). Musically, they were pleasant enough, but what really stuck with me was some of the wacky stories they told about their songs - to wit:

"This is a song from our most recent album 'When the red king comes', where most of the songs were actually performed in the land of the red king. When you are in the land of the red king, you can change your shape, and this is a song about a girl who changes shape from a bird to a frog and then to an eel - it's called 'Icy hands will never melt away'."
"This is a song about a bird whose name was Simon, and Simon had a head which was made out of a candy bar. The other birds wouldn't let him fly, and made him stay on the ground so that when they got hungry, they could fly down and nibble on his head. Simon was a close friend of mine, and I'm going to miss him. So this song is called 'Simon, the bird with the candy bar head'."

Although you've probably never heard of them, R.E.M. think they are the bee's knees - when Messrs. Buck, Mills, and Stipe played last back in Georgia, they picked Elfpower to open for them.

Links of note:

Elfpower's official homepage: http://www.elfpower.com/

My review, 4/10/98, Spaceland, LA.

If you'd like, you can email me here: richard@hearingmusic.com.

Oh, and all content on these pages is copyright Richard Lewis.