GRAMMIES

https://grammies.bandcamp.com

GRAMMIESNoah Bernstein plays saxophone through various effects. Dan Sutherland plays drums and sampler. Noah and Dan play in, whether real or imagined, a blue and yellow room with pink taffeta streamers on the wall.BEST NEW MUSIC, released 06 May 20221. Dark Years2. Ultra3. Here To Stay4. Win5. Day 36. Old New Habits7. You, But Infinity8. Alvord9. Fight Bell10. Noetic11. TwilightWait, did GRAMMIES grow up? Where are all the hype sounds and dog bark samples, the painfully slowed down and pitch-shifted master busses, the low-fi crunch and grain of competing compressors that we've come to expect from the viscerealist beat-head duo? Ever since the band's inception back in 2011, it's felt like the two have been fighting the medium of both their instruments and Music itself, pushing against whatever boundaries they came across along the way. With the latest album, aptly titled "BEST NEW MUSIC," it's more than a decade on and the two finally sound comfortable, if not immutably at peace. Dan Sutherland, the drummer/SPD-SXist, has somehow absorbed the mechanics of the robotic sampler so fully that it has become under his purview as expressive as the human voice. To say nothing of his drumming, which, to these old ears, has somehow gone well past polyrhythmically complex and back around to innately intuitive. Saxophonist/effectist Noah Bernstein, having overcome a gruesome and nearly career-ending hand injury just 10 months prior to the BNM recording session, is focused and meditative in his playing as though coming through a revelation, his live pedal work as destructive as the hardest in-post digital manipulation. The result is the best new music. Recorded over one fateful week in October 2021 in Ann Arbor's snug The Idiolect studio, the album sounds at once concise and infinite. Though it had been years since the duo played together (they, who have made a habit, lest we forget, of farewell show after farewell show [the number perhaps eclipsing the amount of "regular" shows they played in their career as a "working" band]), we hear them fall right back into lockstep for this session. One gets the sense that the extended playing time of the reunion facilitated in both creating an artistic direction and completely obliterating said direction, the obliteration itself ultimately the direction all along, though perhaps not initially expressed at the outset. In the mixing and mastering process, the two reportedly gave the engineers such direction as, can you make it sound less confident and sure of itself? and, can the master be more fragile? The resulting tracks present themselves less as music with emotional content and more as Emotion the distillate. Having entered into the studio expecting to make a triumphant banger of a follow-up to their sophomore effort "GREAT SOUNDING," they exited one week later, bleary eyed and blinded by the low autumnal Michigan sunlight, with an enigmatic ambient album that snuck up on the both of them. Go figure. In the middle of a second pandemic year and families at home awaiting their return, it felt oddly fitting nonetheless. "BEST NEW MUSIC" will forever cement GRAMMIES as the band who won #6 Best New Band in a local Portland publication in 2014 and, despite moving halfway across the country from one another, refused to give up. It will be a cairn along a winding trail of many cairns in a middling but important instrumental no-wave-noesoul band's lifespan guiding listeners not to safety but off the cliff of exploration into the unknown. It will be remembered as, as of 2022, their best new music. It will show once and for all that these dudes are here to stay. -J. W. Ribrodich, from the banks of Lake Pontchartrain, New Orleans, LA, April 15, 2022, twilight

Category: Arts & Entertainment

City: Portland

State: Oregon

Country: United States of America (US)

Currency : USD

Platform: Bandcamp

Technologies used: Fastly CDN