The First Eloi – Queen City Sounds and Art

The First Eloi, photo courtesy the artists

The First Eloi’s single “Last Days of Summer” resonates with that feeling that many of us recognize as the long days of the late spring and summer and the hot days and warm nights transition to sunny days and cooler evenings. It’s a mood that for can trigger memories of summer vacations being over and being back in school whether elementary or secondary or university and a time of adventures and good times give way to getting into the swing of regular life and colder temperatures, a shift into introspective moods and taking stock and getting the work of life done. But for a brief time those recent memories are so vivid even if they seem to be so recently far into the past and beyond reach except as moments to warm your mind when they come back to you. The wintry guitar tones and ethereal vocals along with the more textured riff give these feelings an almost tactile quality in the song like a resurrection of what energy My Bloody Valentine tapped into and embodied when Loveless dropped in November of 1991 and seemed to infuse the season with a dense layers and dreamlike atmospheres. The First Eloi tends to wax a little more dream pop than that but “Last Days of Summer” and a good deal of the rest of the Low Glow the group released on September 13, 2023 is reminiscent of the early shoegaze classic and its true fusion of texture, tone and organic rhythms. Listen to “Last Days of Summer” on Spotify and follow The First Eloi at the links below.

The First Eloi on YouTube

The First Eloi on Bandcamp

The First El oi on Instagram

The First Eloi’s latest single “Neverland” from its forthcoming, debut full length continues its fusion of noisy post-punk and shoegaze spaciousness. There is a momentum to the song in which the warmly ethereal vocals seem to dance about in the mix like a figure in a gritty, luminous fog buoyed by sustained low end rumble. In that haze is a spindly melodic guitar figure that seems to hold the tune together before it concludes with a shudder like a door closing on a secret realm as suggested by the song title and the song’s references to Tinkerbell and days seeming to stretch on longer than they would in normal life. Maybe this is a song about hanging with Peter Pan and crew but perhaps more a metaphor of making a life that feels like it is elevated and magical and imbued with a significance that isn’t there when mundane concerns dominate. Given the name of the band is a reference to H.G. Wells’ 1895 classic novel The Time Machine and its Utopian people the Eloi who lead an idyllic life with supported by a dark secret. Listen to “Neverland” on Spotify and follow The First Eloi at the links below.