The Olivia Tremor Control
The Same Place
ELEPHANT 6
In total, Elephant 6 Recording Co. features 56 different projects on its label roster (despite plenty of overlapping membership) and ranges all over the Western and Southern hemispheres of the US beyond its central HQ in Athens, Georgia. E6 favorites include Neutral Milk Hotel, of Montreal, Elf Power, The Apples in Stereo, and The Olivia Tremor Control, the latter of whom balanced the cosmic multi-track tinkering of a psychedelic rock band pulling inspirational strands from The Beatles, The Zombies, The Beach Boys, and The Dukes of the Stratosphear on 1996’s cult-classic debut Music From the Unrealized Film Script: Dusk at Cubist Castle. Led by the late Will Cullen Hart, the project was the most successful among its label at fusing indie rock’s DIY culture with hippie-daydream uneasiness through opened portals of time.
Progress on The Same Place, the band’s third and final album, had started and stopped multiple times at least as far back as 2000, after OTC had formally split up. Essentially resurrecting two of the band’s fallen members, it’s no wonder mortality hangs on many of the album’s lyrics—even the title points to how, despite us kicking against it daily, we all end up right back where we started. The record opens with mystic-seer ease on “Begin Now!,” as if the band is slipstreaming through time and space and purposefully leaving a breadcrumb trail to dead ends and multi-song suites á la “Green Typewriters,” where the sci-fi journey itself is the final destination. Slowing down and appreciating the details has always been a central tenet of the E6 collective, and “Being Now!” kicks things off with OTR’s philosopher-like ambiguity, fleeting moments of pleasure that amount to a wild trip: “You’ve been there long ago / And you’ve been there seconds ago,” Hart sings. “You’re about there / You’ll be there / You might never be there / You’ll always be there.”
Despite the prolonged absence—and the near 40-year span of writings and recordings The Same Place pulls from—Olivia Tremor Control’s final opus appears to pick up exactly where they left off 27 years ago. Each track is a tape-looped gem: a ’70s-era Beach Boys aura hangs over the mid-album reset “Now Begin,” while the rollicking folk odyssey “Leaf” is a welcome respite between experiments. Elsewhere, the familiar E6 horn blasts on “Timewaster” are as welcoming as breathing in the smells of a long-familiar room. OTC’s best instincts as veteran musicians are present throughout: Fans of Dusk at Cubist Castle or the sound-collage parties heard on 1999’s Black Foliage: Animation Music can enjoy The Same Place’s middle ground, including the interstellar trip that is the seven-part “Path of the Parallels.”
The shadow of grief hangs over this dark trip, given that the release not only arrives in the wake of Hart’s passing in 2024, but also the death of co-founder Bill Doss back in 2012. Which seems to explain why The Same Place casts doubts over even its most melodic zeniths—the jammy “1/2 Way Down,” the beautifully yearning “It’s Not Impossible for Golden Times,” the time-traveling sweetness of “California Demise 4.” Hart and Doss and their E6 guests who popularized these types of tape-looping masterpieces 30 years ago showcase how psychedelic rock can be so much more than pastiche and flower fields. There’s darkness to wrestle with in our cosmic searching, from the fossil records of Earth to our yearning investigations into Mars. The album closes with a very human feeling of searching for sweetness within the pain, as the two swirl within all of us: “Oh little wonder / Don’t ever leave here / This is the place where you belong / And don’t you worry about tomorrow / We will sing the sweeter song.”
