SENTRIES - Gem of the West
Eau Claire Records
Released on May 2nd, 2025
There’s something intensely personal about the way Gem of the West carries itself. It’s loud and raw and bristling with teeth, but there’s also a strange kind of tenderness to it—like someone showing you their cracked and dusty hometown, one busted speaker at a time. For SENTRIES, the solo recording project of Kim Elliot, this record marks a shift from isolation to confrontation. Where 2024’s Snow as a Metaphor for Death flirted with broad existential dread, Gem of the West plants its feet in the dirt and screams into the Lethbridge wind.
Everything here has a palpable urgency. Guitars are coiled and mangled into dissonant knots, drums stumble and thunder like a fist fight in a concrete basement, and Elliot’s vocals land somewhere between shouted confession and exorcism. But what really makes the record click is how carefully that chaos is engineered. It’s noise rock, yes—but it’s noise rock with deliberate shape and tension, with each track structured to let discomfort hang just long enough before swinging back with force. There’s a pulse underneath the distortion, and it’s steady as hell.
On “Charmed Houses,” Elliot comes out swinging—grit under the fingernails, unflinching. It’s not clean, but it’s clear that every jagged edge was placed with care. Later, Elliot draws you into a completely different kind of headspace: slower, more meditative, but still simmering with dread just beneath the surface. It’s here that the album’s emotional scope starts to feel fully realized—grief and nostalgia circling each other warily, both refusing to flinch.
The final track sprawls into eight minutes of dynamic build and release, reaching for something larger than any individual moment. It doesn't play like a flex or an experiment—it plays like someone needing that time and space to work something out. At its best, SENTRIES sounds like a project built on compulsion rather than ambition. Not in a messy way, but in a way that feels rooted in lived emotion—something sharp and necessary that had to get out.
What’s maybe most exciting is how Gem of the West holds together despite its variety. Some tracks stagger and seethe, others sway and shimmer, but they all feel cut from the same weather-beaten cloth. The whole thing was recorded and produced by Elliot alone, and you can hear that intimacy in the way the songs breathe. It’s never overcooked—nothing’s been rounded off for comfort or smoothed into palatability. It feels like a private release made public, a confession hurled at the sky.
With this record, SENTRIES steps out of the bedroom and onto the stage—but it doesn’t feel like a departure. Instead, it feels like a natural expansion: same ghost, louder haunt. Gem of the West is a messy, gripping, fiercely personal album that proves Kim Elliot isn’t just trying to play in the noise rock scene—he’s bending it around his own whims.
