We tend to think of Conan The Barbarian as a big, dumb fucker with a sword. But Conan was something else, too. Robert E. Howard, the great pulp writer, was probably the closest thing to a peer that H.R. Lovecraft ever had. Howard dreamed up Conan when he was 28, two years before he committed suicide. As conceived by Howard, Conan was a kind of mystical warrior-king, a brutal death-dealer wandering the world in some mysterious prehistorical age, fighting gods and only caring for his own survival. He was a mythic figure invented out of whole cloth, and those Howard stories feel connected to ancient and mysterious forces. The Massachusetts band Elder started out as a Conan-themed band, and they didn't mean it in a jokey way; there are two different songs on Elder's self-titled 2006 debut called "Riddle Of Steel." In the past decade, Elder have grown and expanded their sound, to the point where they're one of the most restless and inventive forces at work in their entire wing of the metal underground. But you can still hear, in their music, that elemental concept that first inspired them, the dream of a lost era where might and bloodthirst ruled.