Grails You’ve been driving in the desert for days. No sign of life is present and yours is quickly exiting your pores like 5th graders in a school fire drill. The stubble on your cheeks has claimed your face as its own and the itching has become unbearable as your mid 90’s compact car struggles to make it over the next dune. As your wrinkled air freshener circles above your dashboard like the vultures anxiously awaiting your exit from the car, you feel your engine pull and tug, giving up its life to the sordid environment. Your body is frozen by the sun and your will is leaning towards the plunge your vehicle just took. Upon realizing the perpetual doom the situation offers, you succumb to the delusion of mirages lurking outside your window and you borrow the energy from some unknown place, crawl from the driver’s seat, and collapse in the smoldering sand. Your eyes fixate on the swirling vultures above and the illusions that once teased your sight transmogrify into a series of audio stimulations. And while quietly your life seeps out in the loneliest, deadliest place the Earth knows, a sudden flux of sound fills your ears as death welcomes you. This is the Grails. Gritty and mephitic with passionate, yet almost expressionless jeer, the Black Tar Prophecies Volume III is a collection of two prior volumes with the addition of two new songs. The collection follows a path set by previous releases from this Portland five-piece whose prior work on Neurot, Temporary Residence, and Robotic Empire is a clear indication of their grievous sound. Without doubt, the Prophecies take the listener to new depths far below the soil of traditional instrumental rock. Fuck the cloud-walking, gates-of-heaven post-rock 2006 has put forward, the Grails toss your flesh aside like the empty wrapper it is and rattle your bones with its mournful, carnal ambience. The above-mentioned new songs included in the album, "More Erosion" and "Erosion Blues," offer an amalgam of gritty, tribal passages and open-ended jazzy analects that tease and soothe with unexpected sludge.Infused with the same grisly, overcast theme the Grails are known for, the remaining material on Volume III stretches from the acoustic straits of “Smokey Room” to the underworld banjo passages on “Stray Dog”, eventually accumulating in the album closer, an 8 minute epic tour of hell, led by Johnny Cash and Igor Stravinsky. Death in the desert and the depths of hell aside, the music on Black Tar Prophecies as a whole is engrossing. With delicate and flawless production, the underlying ambient elements offered are poignant, while subtle enough to share their presence with the interloping acoustic and piano passages. Smitten with emotional seduction and instrumental eccentricity, the completed Black Tar Prophecies give good reason to the bringers of folk-gloom and their fans to poke their heads into the light and rejoice, even if just for a moment, before burying themselves again among the muddled beauty the Grails never cease to create. -Jonathan Brooks Score: 8/10 |
