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Music From Elba

Antietam is pleased to announce the remastering of our second album, Music From Elba (1986), for this special digital release, recalibrated for the new millennium by Steve Silverstein. The album was previously only available on vinyl and cassette.

Music From Elba was recorded in 1985 at Carnegie Hill Studios in Manhattan, with Wolf Knapp, Tim Harris, and Tara Key, along with Sean Mulhall on drums, and Albert Garzon producing.

Tim: I don’t think any of us really made music like that later. Unlike recordings driven by one creative vision, Music From Elba was born out of countervailing, at times conflicting approaches. There weren’t really any rules. Wolf contributed time changes, unpredictable melodies, and a kind of beat poetry into his epic compositions. Tara and I molded some of Wolf’s brilliant lyrics into rock song choruses that could only be called “more conventional” without really being conventional at all.

The outside is welcome
Even if they don’t want to come in
Even if they don’t want to come in

At times I felt like an innocent bystander as Wolf and Tara, always with admirable Southern gentility, battled it out for the soul of the band. Sean and Albert tried to make sense of the three of us.

Music From Elba emerged with a much slicker sound than our first record, and for some who admired the majesty of Tara’s guitar and the chaos of Wolf and I both playing bass, it was too slick.

Perhaps, with a young band making their second album, it would have been better for our unity and commercial future if it had fit more neatly into a category like roots music, the Great American Songbook, or that hazy catchall, alternative rock. But today, after many years, albums, musical styles, and projects among all of us, Music From Elba takes its place as simply one kind of aesthetic choice, not of one person, but of a time and place and a group of very alive musicians.

Tara: Listening to Elba almost 40 years later I am struck by a feeling of exhilaration, at how many ideas were unabashedly crammed into one box and how confidently we presented our skewered vision, but also a slight sadness about how, in contrast to the bonhomie and exuberance of our all-for-one, four-from-Louisville-against-the-world attitude on the first record, I hear in the interstices of Elba each of us retreating to our own tents. It is a bold and beautiful document but, for myself, there is also a bit of melancholy; a real-time reflection of what exile looks like.

Wolf: Logical progression to Long Player #2—more refined and even more ambitious. The album take of “Rocky Face” was the first time we’d completed the song. Walking on stage in Philly at that old bank building and just owning it. Of course that was my last gig. At least I went out on a roll. I could see how that wouldn’t make much sense to the principals. I’d guess that the same joie de vivre, the life of the mind that enabled the fairly crazy stuff I badged us with—what was it? Confidence I guess, matched only by Tara’s; the imagined stakes involved pushed me to strike out and self-validate the hard way.

CRITIC(AL) SPEAK:

Antietam’s self-titled debut album was the most satisfying American music of last year. The record passed up the dutiful traditionalism and threadbare myth making, yet it radiated an imposing sense of time and place. This music was almost frighteningly alert to the textures of everyday disjunction, the nuances of dread as the way of life….Antietam have got hold of a terrific theme: exile as the perpetual civil war of the marginal against the margins they’ve been banished to…How far can you take those suspicions and contradictions? That question involves more than the band’s music: they are at the core of any lives that music might enter. Down in the catacombs of visible culture, Key and company have their war cut out for them.

—Howard Hampton, The Village Voice, 1986

If only I could have been my age now during the mid-eighties. I would have not only gone out to see Antietam perform every chance that I could’ve had, but I would have been a self-appointed promotional man for the group, spreading their praise wherever I went until they finally received the acclaim that they truly deserved. Music From Elba may be the main piece of evidence that proves how Antietam has been one of the most interesting, and surely one of the overall best American alternative rock groups ever….While still being a fairly irregular and ever shapeless album, Elba still remains a fascinatingly well-focused collection of songs. On each track, Antietam here sounds so young, excited, confident and exuberant about what they’re doing. It’s hard to find records that show all this so consistently. Twenty-six years on, Music From Elba still sounds significantly different, intriguing and truly peerless as it did when it was released.

—Keith Hadad, Record Crates United, 2012

We have added to Elba our single of the Beatles’ “Rain,” which was recorded during the Elba sessions.

Shortly after Elba, Wolf left the band to study jazz and play metal, and later recorded and toured behind Tara’s solo records, Bourbon County and Ear and Echo. Tara and Tim would go on to record over a dozen albums by Antietam and Tara Key has recorded as a solo artist and collaborator with Rick Rizzo and others. Mike Weinert and Sean Mulhall live in Louisville where Mike works on boats and barges moving up and down our beloved Ohio River and Sean is a professor of musicology, with a specialty in Irish music.