Delving - All Paths Diverge (2024)

Country: Germany
Style: Psychedelic Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 23 Aug 2024
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram

Delving is only a band when playing live. In the studio, it's one man, Nicholas DiSalvo, who's best known for being the guitarist and vocalist in the psychedelic/stoner rockers Elder, who hail from Fairhaven, Massachusetts but are currently based in Berlin, the one in Germany not the many in the States. This is a side project of his to find a home for the many song fragments and ideas that he generates over time, being "an almost obsessive songwriter, working on music every day". The first Delving album was a product of the pandemic, collating material created before it, but this follow-up is work that originated since then.

He wrote everything and performed almost everything, the only other musical contributions that get a credit being Fabien de Meno on some keyboards (Rhodes and upright piano) and his Elder colleague Michael Risberg providing "additional guitar ambience" on one track, Zodiak. If all that suggests that this might be a very Elder-sounding release, that's only true if we consider how that band has changed over the past couple of decades. They used to be a stoner metal band, but they softened up considerably when they recorded The Gold & Silver Sessions in 2019 to sound more like a prog/psych band who veer often into krautrock and they've mostly stayed there since, on Omens and Innate Passage.

Certainly, for all the guitar vehemence in the second half of Chain of Mind or early in Zodiak, this is primarily driven by the keyboards and that's often all there is. Just check out the funky start to New Meridian to see that. This track is almost world music filtered through krautrock, the core of it reminding of Jamaican steel drums, of all things, but with an electronic beat layered over the top and building keyboard layers. It evolves, of course, but the keyboards continue to lead the way, even when bass and drums arrive to take major parts. It's one of my favourite pieces of music here and very possibly the top of the list.

It's also entirely instrumental because DiSalvo never uses his voice and I'm not upset about that. I don't dislike his vocals for Elder, but I get so immersed in their long instrumental sections that I'm never particularly happy when he opens his mouth to remind me that I'm listening to a song rather than floating peacefully in the spaces between the stars enjoying the distant scenery. With vocals completely absent here, I remain blissfully immersed throughout, only brought out of it after an hour and two minutes when silence takes over if I haven't got the album on loop.

And immersion is the chief success here. It's very easy to get lost in this album, to lose track of the rest of the world as the music takes us somewhere else. If that's what DiSalvo is going for, then he nails it here. The catch to that is that it means that the album works best as an album rather than as individual tracks. Either you'll like it or you won't. Picking a favourite track or favourite section of a track is going to be much harder.

For me, New Meridian is the only one that does something different to the rest of the album. It's the lightest piece and the most keyboard-centric, until the bass kicks in halfway. However, it's also the most active. Everything else is about presenting an atmosphere and leaving us be to float on through it. This one feels more like some amorphous alien creature that's playing with us and has every intention of making us join in with its games. That's especially true for the first half but it's there in the second half too.

Other than that, I'd maybe call out The Ascetic, because I like how jagged it feels, even though it's ended in surprisingly abrupt fashion. Others might plump for Zodiak, which is a little heavier with that extra guitar ambience, making it the closest to a latter day Elder song, but it's also easily the longest piece here at thirteen and a half minutes. With that said, it changes around the eight and a half minute mark, letting the guitars fade away into the distance and switching back to keyboard atmospheres.

All in all, this is a solid 7/10 all the way but I'm starting to wonder about whether it deserves more than that because I've been listening to it for about four days solid. Maybe I will. Maybe I won't. Let's see how I think about it while listening to something else.