The Trunk 11/3/2018: BEM Marches On

March is a very busy month for BEM. I'm not really sure why, but we've put out at least one thing every March since we got started, including three last year! And, with this year marking BEM's fifth birthday, we thought it proper to go back and take a look at what we've released every March.

As per usual with these archive features, every heading is also a link to the album in question on the webstore!

2014: Motherland

This is what happens when your photographer forgets to clean his lens.

2014 was the first year in which we even existed during March, and we started off our tradition, such as it is, on a strong note. Simon Godfrey, after kicking the label off in explosive fashion with electronic opus Rise Up Forgotten, Return Destroyed, expressed his more songwriterly side with Motherland, a collection of eleven of his own songs that amply showed off his versatility. Personal and passionately performed, our third ever album release helped set the tone for the variety of music we hoped to release in the years to come.

2015: Morning Sun

You're not allowed to look directly at this album cover.

Jon Hunt, previously styled as jh, brought his trademark singer-songwriter verve to Bad Elephant with Morning Sun, a greatest-hits compilation of material from his three previous albums. Displaying an excellent range of both tone and subject matter, this sampling of Jon's decade of work and experience as a solo artist is a delight to listen to. Every single song will have you humming along in very short order, which made Elephant Towers quite a noisy place back in spring 2015.

2016: All Our Yesterdays

Words cannot express how much I want this coat.

Matthew Parmenter, perhaps better known for his role in Detroit prog outfit Discipline, proved his solo chops back in March 2016 with All Our Yesterdays. There's a strong element of the actor to his vocals here - you can feel Parmenter really inhabiting the voices of his characters, beyond simply singing the lines, and this elevates his performance to something really rather special. Often unsettling, sometimes downright uncanny, but always compelling, this is high-concept songwriting and performance at its very best.

2017: Tope's Sphere 2

Tope's Blue and Orange Contrast.

March 2017 was an unusually busy month for us, seeing no fewer than three albums released under our flag. This one was the first, the companion soundtrack to the lost TV show of the same name (which, for clarity, never existed) and a wonderful slice of proggy weirdness and 70s televisual nostalgia. Orange Clocks may be a 7-piece outfit, but they hang together uncannily well to produce something chaotic, irreverent, and, above all else, fun.

2017: Happy People

Objects in heads-up display may be weirder than they appear.

Oh, Mr Slatter, where would we be without you? Somewhere substantially less strange, I reckon, and much, much poorer for it. Happy People is, like most of Tom's work, deeply unusual, but never slips into incoherence. There's a lot going on here, and Tom's lyrics, masterfully written and loaded with layers of meaning and feeling, hold it all together near-effortlessly. This album may have been something of a change in subject matter for him, but the quality remains as high as always.

2017: Gargoyles

The monster's gearing up to tell a really bad joke. The girl remains unimpressed.

Much beloved by Mrs Elephant and by the label as a whole, Big Hogg are purveyors of, in their own words, "electric music for the mind and body". What this means in the case of Gargoyles is a set of thoughtful, Canterbury-ish tunes, led by three fantastic vocalists and buoyed by a distinctive combination of brass and electric piano. Electric though it may be, the music carries a kind of old-world charm that belies the slick production and eclectic style.

2018: Where the Moonlight Snows

Wait, if that's a mountain, how big are those damn birds?

Well, we're not going to break our streak, are we? After the great success of Unsongs back in 2016, Mothertongue are returning with another collection of sharp, diverse, infectiously singable songs, and we at Elephant Towers can scarcely wait to get them out to all of you. If you'd like to make damn sure that you get them as soon as you can, preorders are open now ahead of a March 23rd release (less than two weeks away), so get in there now!

Status Update

As we just mentioned, Where the Moonlight Snows is out in less than two weeks' time, and preorders for the equally exciting The Euphoric (see last week's Trunk for more on that!) are open now, though you'll have to wait another couple of months for that.

Review Roundup

The latest issue of Songlines Magazine rated The Divine Abstract at a respectable four stars - you can have a read of their review below!