Go on a weird journey with Elephant Stone’s “The Three Poisons”

by Scott Wilson

When I first heard The Three Poisons, Elephant Stone’s third full-lengther, I had some biased thoughts. They got a sitar? Tabla? Dreamy singing about visions and stuff? What the Hell is this hippy logjam? Ever since The Beatles sought spiritual awakening in India, pseudo-hippy musicians have been throwing sitars and dilrubas into tracks like your mom throws “Trader Joe’s Indian Spice” onto the pot roast. Most of the time it sounds contrived, but Elephant Stone can blend traditional Indian music with rock n’ roll while abstaining from the affectations of westernized mysticism.

Elephant Stone’s frontman, Rishi Dhir, is trained on the instruments of classical Indian music and plays them expertly. Many of the riffs that pepper each track could have been borrowed from traditional ragas, as the fast finger picking of Indian music blends seamlessly into steady psychedelic rock. Though The Beatles might have figured this out first, when you put all the tools of Indian and Western pop music together in a single entity under the guide of a mutual master you get something both familiar and exotic. The Three Poisons is fun to listen to the first time around and stays interesting after the fiftieth listen.

The album is excellent on a production and technical level as well. Whether you listen on a booming system or on your computer’s speakers, The Three Poisons has a rich sound that isn’t too busy and covers a wide audio range, which is good for listening to when there are a lot of other noises around.  As a genre, psychedelic rock makes for good road trip music because it encourages the mind to wander but doesn’t get old or offensive, and Elephant Stone is no exception. They’re fast, but not too exciting; niche, but not too obscure; odd, but not too embarrassing to show to a cool co-worker you want to become friends with, but aren’t sure what kind of music they like.

Lyrically, The Three Poisons is fine. It’s pop; they sing about love and stuff, but they keep it vague enough that they could be singing about something else. It’s safe, but with trippy music you kind of expect a little subversion in the prose. Elephant Stone has either excluded that element or buried it for more clever listeners than myself.

The Three Poisons is a short LP, with eleven tracks at less than four minutes apiece. It’s good that Elephant Stone didn’t load the record with unnecessary tracks, but for a third album you’d think they’d have enough material to last a train ride across town.  This isn’t a complaint, just an observation. Idle wondering, that, perhaps, since The Three Poisons came out a mere year after their last LP, that it could be a continuation – an extra long EP (ELEP?) or a post-script.

The album balks a lot of expectations: it’s trippy, not hippy; fun, not dumb. A solid record all the way through and proof of the band’s maturity, vision, and musical mastery. The album is out already, so give it a listen.