“And I don’t even know your name, and I know I’m the one to blame.”
Scarcity breeds demand. Demand drives up prices. One way to ensure scarcity in the entertainment world is the “limited edition” release. Much of the time, such a marketing scheme doesn’t work out. More successful, but almost always achieved by accident and benefitting resellers rather than producers, is the release of something slightly controversial or legally murky with changes made once the thing’s already out there in the world. Think of The Beatles’ Yesterday and Today or Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland. A surefire way for a band to get some publicity is to release a halfway decent record with images of a copyrighted comic book character on the album cover. Some bands have actually paid to license the use of iconic characters, but a few notable names have used famous superhero likenesses on their albums and later had to change them. MF Doom had to remove the Marvel supervillain from the reissue of his debut album, Doomsday; Sufjan Stevens almost had Illinois pulled from shelves for shipping it out the door with a depiction of Superman on the cover. In the late 1960s, a group of young Brits formed an amped up blues group that was aggressive and loud. They felt that The Incredible Hulk captured their shared ethos and decided to name their band after the character, adding “Elias” to the beginning of the name to pass a legal sniff test. “Elias” means “my God is Yahweh” in Hebrew; not quite sure what angle they were going for with that but it sounds cool.
Anyway, they decided to sleeve their debut with a depiction of a long-haired, shirtless, green man lumbering about with two naked, bound women. So much for passing the sniff test—this thing is blatantly provocative and infringing on copyrights. For starters, such horrid imagery is only going to appeal to fetishists or metalheads, not to people who actually like The Hulk as a character. Consider that Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, and Deep Purple, the three bands most commonly associated with the birth of heavy metal, were only in their infancy at this time, so it wasn’t like they were capitalizing on the aesthetic. Second, if you’re hoping that the owner of a copyrighted character might see your unlawful use of it and just shrug it off, it would behoove you to consider not depicting that character rampaging around covered in blood and carrying naked women. But I digress. The music that’s on the album is the real reason it exists and why I know about, and the music that Elias Hulk created for Unchained is pretty decent; more roughed up blues than the brutal metal implied by its cover, but still palatable enough for something dug up out of rock’s past.
In the late 1960s, guitarist Peter Grenville Fraser and bassist James Haines were in a flower power group, but they weren’t feeling it. They recognized that the hippie spirit was fading, that something different was in the air. They tried out R&B but decided their music needed some more bite, so they enlisted drummer Bernie James, vocalist Pete Thorpe, and lead guitarist Neil Tatum. Most of the group had previous experience in other bands of various types, but none of them had achieved popular success. But when they formed Elias Hulk, busted out the thumping drums and fuzzy bass, added dash of prog rock, a pinch of psychedelia… they still failed to achieve success. They eked out a living as a live act, but after Unchained failed to provide enough remuneration to justify soldiering on, the band called it quits.
The album isn’t half bad, though. The skittery drumming and groovy bass of ‘We Can Fly’ kick things off nicely, but the song quickly shifts into a stoned out drum solo that isn’t that great and doesn’t feel like it was earned. Some pressings flip the opening track of the A side with that of the B side, so some copies of Unchained begin with ‘Anthology of Dreams’, a fairly benign hard rock song. Highlights include the raga-infused ‘Delphi Blues’, the tempo-shifting ‘Been Around Too Long’, the chugging rhythms and ripping guitar solos of ‘Yesterday’s Trip’, and the reverb-heavy ‘Free’. The glue that holds these songs all together and gives the album some real meat worth sinking your teeth into is the frequently tasteful bass lines of James Haines. His grooves aren’t earth-shattering or anything, but to my ear, they’re a level above the contributions of the other members and the element most deserving of Sabbath comparisons.
But aside from those basic stylistic similarities, that’s where the comparisons breakdown, because while Unchained is perfectly decent, it’s just not at the level of its popular contemporaries. On the surface it has the makings of something like Black Sabbath but it doesn’t combine its elements in the dynamic fashion that makes that debut so engaging. You can pound drums really hard until your face turns blue, but you’ve gotta pound them really hard with a high level of skill and intuition to match Bill Ward.
The cover of Unchained promises something brutal and heavy, but it’s really just a middle-of-the-road psychedelic rock album. It has a nice mix of stylistic elements, but doesn’t hold up against the hard rock pioneer albums that came out around the same time. But the heavyweights aren’t the right comparison for Elias Hulk. Instead, I tend to mentally lump their single album in with those of other one-album prog/psychedelic/garage rock bands that were ambitious enough to release a debut but either too unlucky, too unremarkable, or too impersistent to make a career out of it—Fraction (Blood Moon), Yesterday’s Children (Yesterday’s Children), Fuzzy Duck (Fuzzy Duck) and the like. Among this milieu, they fit right in. It’s good stuff, but there’s a reason only hardcore fans of the genre have given it the time of day.
Favorite Tracks: Free; Delphi Blues.
Sources:
“Elias Hulk”. Bournemouth Beat Boom. 2019.