Here it is, baby: "Lather, Rinse, Repeat." Scholars place this canto among the oldest known recorded musical texts, and the only one of its kind to top the Billboard charts in two separate millennia. Owing to a bitter copyright dispute, that beloved song is not included on As Above, the debut CD release from the Arcturus-based Club d'Elf, but don¹t let that discourage you from plumbing its cavernous depths, where novel (and Gnostic) delights await your ears. Formed in a base of lanolin and tocopherol, the true origins of Club D'Elf remain lost to history (though there are those who suggest compelling evidence that it began as an improvisational side project spun off during Saul of Tarsus' Zealots-era studio sessions). Its current incarnation was birthed anew in the reptile house of our local zoo, and is the brainchild of Micro Vard, the cult's reclusive and mercurial Chief Adept. Vard, a supposed 33 degree initiate of the Sisterhood of the Inordinate Prudences, is an inveterate scatologist with a penchant for charity beachcombing (as well as a rumored $13-a-day expired-discount-vitamin habit.) Whatever his predilections, of this there can be no doubt: he is a skilled aural traffic controller, guiding grooves on and off of the runways with the swan-like motions of his red and orange flashlight wands. Peering though his golden speculum into alien worlds few dare even to contemplate, he returns with a glistening message of hyperbolic transcendence, a call to arms for the pacifist in each of us. Call it Eschatological Realism. Necro-romanticism. It caresses your skin like a wet potato sack. It grows like vines around your ankles; it is more plant than human. It sings. In As Above, as elsewhere, Club D'Elf turns wine into water, transmuting a mere intoxicant into something pure, elemental. In a word: Essential. Put it this way. Some people want their music hot and steaming, others prefer it clinically sanitized, like a sports stadium men's room. Me, I like my music like I take my coffee: unfiltered and stone cold. So grab your glue guns and your water-wings, kids, 'cause it don¹t get any colder than this.