Happy Elke Day! 

Happy Elke Day! 

Elke Celebrates Her Record Release as Meg Elsier Opens 


As I stood outside The Blue Room, I felt my body battling both the 25-degree weather and the sheer excitement of the show that I was going to see.  Tonight, attached to Jack White’s Third Man Records, the shivering crowd was going to be let in to Elke’s record release party.  Elke was debuting her new project Divine Urge.  It is her sophomore record.  The show was being sponsored by Nashville’s public radio station WNXP and the former “Record of the Month” artist, Meg Elsier, was slated to be the opener.  This was going to be a beautiful culmination of talent, music and like-minded folks gathered to share in the mystical power that live music holds over us.   

The gig started with Meg Elsier and her band popping onto the stage with an exuberant demeanor.  I had spoken with bass player Jashaun Smith and Meg once before- at their Nashville show atop The Bobby Hotel- about a month ago, before they gallantly sauntered onto a multi-city tour.  The expedition to promote their debut album spittake had them circling back home, and it was certainly great to see their faces again.  I couldn’t wait to hear the music that had me falling in love with them the first time I ever heard them on 91.1 WNXP.  

Elsier started with a track called ‘Dog”, then eased into a couplet of songs from the album which were the pressings self-titled tune ‘Spittake’, followed by ‘IZNOTREAL’.  Meg stands gracefully middle-front and strums softly on her guitar until she doesn’t have to anymore.  Her style has moments of shoegaze-esque chords, mixed with her own non-confrontational stances littered in slight distortion and whimsical vocals that still tug on your heartstrings. Then there’s a jarring note that is plucked from a different place.  It was in an obscure location just off in the distance.  It’s not too far for Meg to reach out and grab it and shove it in your face.  It’s motion. It’s loud.  It’s a guttural feeling that rocks your core and changes up the intensity.  She is on her toes and is exhaustingly jumping to the beat that the bass and drums are providing. 

We are all hooked in the moment and bouncing with her.  Her songs are impressively strong and layered with raw and untampered emotion. ‘IZNOTREAL’ stands out for me as a pseudo-emo-grunge piece filled with heavy fuzz and jolting guitar riffs.  Jashaun’s bass rambles forward with booming propensity and the drummer brings a hefty tempo that is both commanding and compelling. She laughs and jokes with the crowd as she squats down to adjust her pedals and levels by hand.  Her face is now two feet below the microphone.  “I don’t need a microphone.  I’ll just yell!” Then Meg exclaims, “Happy Elke Day!” She springs back up and continues.  The show is once again spectacular. In her own words, her music is about “love, death, nostalgia, youth, anxiety, depression and everything in between, with a uniquely self-deprecating touch”. Meg takes us through all these things and makes us better people for listening.   

At the end of the show Meg recognized me and leaned over off the front of the stage to give me a hug and the setlist.  I have received the index of plays at the last show which they signed.  Earlier in the frigid line, before the doors opened, I had met CJ and his girlfriend Ashley.  It was Ashley’s 30th birthday and they had traveled all the way from Boone, NC for the show.  I handed the page to Ashley and wished her a happy birthday. 

“To be honest, I don’t think I knew what the record meant to me/what I wanted to create until it was done. I know I wanted to record an album because I felt proud of these songs and I really was craving for people to hear them. What I really was searching for was an introduction as… meg. Not someone I’m mirroring, or someone I’ve been trying to become. Just who I am genuinely at this moment.” 
– Meg Elsier 

Elke is Nashville songwriter Kayla Graninger, and she is an artist in every sense of the word. While I hate comparisons, descriptors are necessary.  Elke is Kate Bush, David Byrne (Talking Heads) and Cindy Wilson (B-52’s) rolled into a magnificent package of pageantry.  She arrived onstage donned in a skirt that was actually a suit jacket.  The shoulder pads jaunting out from her hips and the sleeves draping down towards the floor. That fashion forward presence evoked a feeling of seeing Talking Heads frontman David Byrne during the filming of Stop Making Sense, with his oversized business attire.  The band all matched shirts and the lead guitar and bass player were topped off with knit beanies.  There was an essence of DEVO that loomed in my mind.  All these picks and pulls from the creatives of yesteryear plundered forward into the ethos, yet I would learn that her originality is quite steadfast. 

Elke loomed large on stage like an isolated redwood that holds you in awe as you stare up at it. She stripped off the jacket early in the gig to reveal an eighties style leotard equipped with grey-plaid leggings and knee-high boots.  She danced with sharp movements that ended with poses then started again with jagged beginnings.  Her voice is very much her own.  Her unique vocals are another aspect of what makes Elke a bold performer.  Therein lies the bombastic sense of Kate Bush.  I noticed a connection to nature and the natural world while watching her too. Then I found this quote online from the musician, “No matter how much we develop as a society, we will always have to return to nature — it is wiser than us and cannot be controlled.”  

Elke is a vibe.  This was my first time seeing the art-pop musician live and it was a stunning experience.  She is the full ensemble of poetry, sound and dance.  At one point the band laid out a treadmill for her to walk on while she sang- and at one point, she read from her brand-new book of poetry called Divine Digest.  One stanza ended with the line “I stared a hole into the wall”.  She asked the crowd to repeat it, and we obliged several times over. 

I felt as if I had been beamed back in time, to one of Andy Warhols warehouse parties.  Elke is certainly comparable to Nico, The Velvet Underground and an avant-garde genre that seemingly left us in the early seventies.  However, Elke is the resurgence that the music society should be clamoring for.  She shapes every note like clay on a wheel.  She dances all the movements like chiseled stone. The brush strokes across the canvas are wild and endearing.  However, what we should be left looking at is not the final product on the pedestal but rather, carefully placed and intentional fragments with unused watercolors on the floor. These are the components of her craft.  The leftovers and scraps are the real art and where existent emotions become identifiable.  I wonder if she would agree with this assessment.  It is my intention to say that she is not a conformist but rather an eccentric being that looks past norms and creates new ideas that we might have otherwise looked past. 

Her songs rain down with magnitudes of metaphors and scamper into the microphone and through our ears.  The imaginary in our mind is crafted by every note that Elke and her band grant us.  The vocals and lyrics are certainly careening and ever moving like chaotic flashes of light finding each other to create symmetry. It’s scattered and yet organized in the same sense that notes in a journal could be a cohesive book. And I absolutely adore her voice.  She said about the record in an interview with Culture Cabinet: 

“It started with some songs that I had written on the piano years prior. Some of those piano songs ended up just going on an EP, My ‘Human Experience,’ when I had originally intended them to be a part of what would become Divine Urge. I recorded them all on Logic, and it gave me a gateway into my intuition that I hadn’t explored with before. I hadn’t trusted myself or abilities to build a song on a program, but I somehow left the trust door open and walked through it.” 

The closer was the single ‘Enchanté’. This single is both hypnotic and toe-tapping as it is delivered with a fun bass led plucking and a repeat chanting of the chorus “Love to see you enchanté” that Elke draws another pirouette from.  The show was theatrical and ethereal, and Elke was an absolute delight to behold. When the lights kicked on from blue to white, I urged Ashley to grab the setlist that was laid out before us.  She hesitated, I didn’t -and gave her another piece for her new collection.  Music draws us together and forms bonds that we may not otherwise have.  Meg Elsier and Elke did that for us on December 6th, 2024.  They made us whole.   

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