On its third full-length album, Toronto trio Elliott BROOD is using electric guitar for the first time, and it sounds great. Days Into Years is the follow-up to the 2008 Polaris short-listed Mountain Meadows, and it definitely puts to bed any sort of “country” label that the band may have carried with its previous recordings. The sound is deep, and as E.B.’s biography describes it, “amped up.” If I Get Old is a swaying rocker, while the vocals get a bit dirty for Hold You. “No one wants to die alone,” sings Mark Sasso, as the song breaks into a great guitar solo. The boys go back to their roots a little with some prominent banjo picking on West End Sky and Owen Sound, a couple of the more stripped down tunes. Their Will closes the album triumphantly with a great juxtaposition of the old and the new, guitar-wise. See the band live Saturday, Oct. 29 at the West End Cultural Centre.

Published in Volume 66, Number 8 of The Uniter (October 19, 2011)