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Few albums this year have made a stronger impression on me than Elevator Songs, a collaboration between the composer and singer-songwriter Gabriel Kahane and the a cappella group Roomful Of Teeth. It's a wildly ambitious musical effort based on an equally ambitious concept: a song cycle about a "kind of creepy" interdimensional hotel where "the ice machine is speaking in tongues" and "aggressively cheerful cooking shows haunt the TV."
As a pure musical achievement, Elevator Songs is staggering. Kahane's songs burst with melody and veer through unexpected chord changes like sports cars whipping around curves. Roomful Of Teeth sing them with gusto, the members taking turns in the spotlight and combining into robust arrangements. The vocals sometimes blend with genre-jumping instrumentation, and there are many moments that defy expectation, like the surprise flash of Auto-Tune on "Sophomore Record" or the rising wave of static on "Not Even The Dead." There's a definite theater-kid energy to it; Kahane has worked with Sufjan Stevens, and the album reminds me of Illinois in the way it deploys the human voice, not to mention its anthology-like structure.
I haven't yet fully grasped what's going on in the world of Elevator Songs, but I find it mesmerizing. Every track is a vignette that zeroes in on a different room in the hotel, which seems to move through time and space or exist outside it, sort of like a supernatural Only Murders In The Building. Or, as NPR puts it, "The White Lotus meets Everything Everywhere All At Once."
The overall context is dark, with allusions to plagues, authoritarian rule, a Lower Manhattan tragedy that may or may not be 9/11, and a fiery apocalypse in the 27th century. Characters include a man in midtown Manhattan mourning a young AIDS victim in the '80s and a US service member grappling with PTSD after tours of Iraq and Afghanistan in the mid-2000s. But there are also moments of levity, like "The Hot Tub (Fitness Center)," with its relatable portrayal of an awkward social interaction, with operatic delivery of lyrics like "I slip in the water and chill the fuck out."
On the dramatic side, it's hard to beat finale "All That Is Solid (The Elevator)," sung by Kahane with a plaintive exhaustion. "So long as I can remember, I have always lived in this elevator," he begins, explaining all the human drama that was, is, and is to come — including the future destruction of the elevator, when "all that is solid will melt into air." It's sort of like Dr. Manhattan's exile to Mars as it might sound on Broadway. But my favorite tune, the one that first hooked me, is maybe the most lighthearted. It's also the one that most literally sounds like elevator music, as we've colloquially understood the term. And a new radio edit of that track happens to be out today.
On the performatively smooth and cheery "Put It In My Valise (Room 1832)," vocalist Jodie Landau (also of Bedroom Community and Wild Up) plays the host of Baggage Service, "a podcast that merges practical travel tips for the late 21st century with a comprehensive guide to spiritual growth and sustenance." He's broadcasting here from Dallas in what seems to be a militarized, Hunger Games-esque version of the future, fielding questions like "How have your efforts to work through past trauma changed your habits as a travel influencer?" from listeners in 2011, 1967, and 2024.
The radio edit of "Valise" out today captures the catchiness, the way Landau's voice brightly beams from the speakers over Kahane's lush chord changes. It does cost us some of his glorious rambling between verses, like this indulgent treasure of a monologue:
Oh, Joan. As my late mentor once said, physical baggage is merely the outward representation of the baggage of the soul. And so, when I advocate for the capsule wardrobe, I am not simply offering practical advice about how to assemble a no-nonsense array of lightweight ensembles that will cause neck injuries among passerby who wheel around to drink in the visual milkshake that is you. No, I am offering nothing less than the spiritual cleansing of our innermost selves.
Although the new condensed version of the song is my peg for bringing Elevator Songs to your attention today, I recommend skipping past it to hear the original album version — or going even farther and digging into the full LP. It's stylized in such a way that some of you with a predisposition for grittier sounds will find it to be Very Much Not Your Thing. But traditionally it's not really my thing either, and I keep coming back to it, loving it more with each pass. Listen below.
Elevator Songs is out now on Octoverse/ARTS MUSIC. Buy it here.
English (US) · 