GRAILS
Burning Off Impurities
Temporary Residence
· Soundtracks sans movies – our critic comes up with his own unique premise.
Instrumental albums always sound like soundtracks without movies, I can’t help but envision what sort of film should be playing behind the music.
The movie that would play behind Grails’s new album Burning Off Impurities would involve cowboys and Easterners in elaborate and colourful costumes racing their Mustangs and Arabian steeds with few pauses for rest. Much like that movie would, the almost non-stop pace of the album gets a bit tiresome after a while, to the point that you need to break for snacks and a nap before you can tackle the denouement.
Grails’s first album on the Temporary Residence label, Burning Off Impurities is a culture clash between East and West, as sitars hammer out Western rhythms. The instruments are many, as Grails combine every sound they can get their hands on to create their compositions, making it even more surprising that from such a broad palette comes so little variation.
The songs do progress from slow to fast to faster, and the elements within each are different, but each of the eight tracks is very much the same. By the end the repetition gets to be a little, well, repetitive.
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