Daily Archive

Any band describing themselves as “heavy metal John Fahey” were bound to come to the attention of this blog at some point (I have been googling that exact phrase every day for some years now).  Their recent history, involving one of the most peculiar and distressing cases of band member loss that I am aware of, gives their new album (a consolidation of their three Black Tar Prophecies EPs) a morbid fascination which will undoubtedly increase interest levels.  Thankfully, the album is strong enough to withstand the inevitable scrutiny, but it is so awesomely dark that any lazy two-left-footed reviewer has the easiest of angles from which to smack one into the back of the net marked “grief”.  Of course, covering eight fleet-footed miles in every game, such a reading of the album is not for me.

The heavy metal tag is a bit misleading; only once, on “Belgian Wake-up Drill”, do Grails crack out some sludgy Sabbaffisms.  There are a couple of tracks of elegiac Fahey-influenced folk (most notably “Stray Dog”), although the influence isn’t as strong as in the records of Jack Rose or Ben Chasny.  They sound to me more like a Godspeed on Fonal Records (indeed, “Erosion Blues” could have walked off Finnish band Kiila’s Silmat Sulkaset record from earlier this year).  Take first track “Back To The Monastery”, with the way its howls of feedback and relentless thumpthumpthumpthump drumming are finally chased down by acoustic guitar melody, and epic last track “Black Tar Prophecy”, which is like this in reverse, with banjo being swamped by drone and impending doom.

Much more unexpectedly, at various points this album sounds a little like Massive Attack.  Not the Massive Attack of who made the tunes and had the beats and all that kind of stuff.  But the Massive Attack who made those records that kind of sat across from you on the Tube glowering at you and fiddling with themselves, making you feel really sick and uncomfortable, especially when the lights went off for a bit; you’d make sure you knew where the emergency alarm was, that’s for sure, and maybe one of those little green hammers which probably weren’t designed for breaking scary men’s heads.  “Bad Bhang Recipe” and “Smokey Room” are particularly clammy and distantly dub-related, and are just lacking a Horace Andy, some smart trainers, a “protracted gestation period” and rumours of huffy band in-fighting.