Time Turns Elastic

AMG Review of Time Turns Elastic

Stephen Thomas Erlewine
All Music Guide

It's never been easy to pigeonhole Trey Anastasio, but even armed with this knowledge Time Turns Elastic, his symphonic collaboration with Don Hart, still manages to surprise. Anastasio has flirted with orchestral pieces before but this is a full-blown, long-form composition arriving in ten movements, its luxurious strings recalling Gil Evans, and Anastasio's twinkling single-note leads alternately bringing to mind Larry Carlton and Jerry Garcia. Not all of Time Turns Elastic is instrumental: by the time "Landslide" starts four songs in, vocals are brought into the tapestry, but they're used as a way to pull the piece into focus, not to push it in a pop direction. Certainly, Time Turns Elastic wasn't meant to be sampled track by track, it's designed to be consumed in one sitting, to feel the waves of sound ebb and flow, to experience the subtleties in what is Anastasio's most intriguing and successful foray into art-pop to date.