Friday Full-Length: Grayceon, Pearl and the End of Days
Is it a full-length? No, it is not. But it is Friday, and at 27 minutes, Grayceon‘s 2013 two-songer EP, Pearl and the End of Days, is longer than some LPs, so whatever. The simple truth is that, every now and again, I go on a Grayceon kick. They’re certainly an autumnal-sounding band in my mind, so maybe that’s part of it, but listening to their more charged or thrashing moments, I’d liken their sound to summer scald as well and perhaps spare you stretching that to an all-seasons trope. But the San Francisco trio’s records call me back on the regular for a kind of spiritual recharge. And also, while we’re being honest, I’ve been a little pissed at myself for not writing about Pearl and the End of Days when it came out for the last decade, so I hope you’ll pardon me if I attempt to exorcise that demon as well.
In 2011, Grayceon issued what has become an all-time album for me in All We Destroy (review here; discussed here). “Shellmounds,” the epic-among-epics “We Can,” “Once a Shadow,” and so on. The fury, the atmosphere, the melody, the sadness, the anger, the sense of wondering why the world can’t be a better place. At that point, the US had been at war for over nine years, which sounds like a lot but is still only about half as long as that war would go. But as with 2020’s Mothers Weavers Vultures (review here), which followed 2018’s IV (review here), the three-piece of cellist/vocalist Jackie Perez Gratz (also Brume, Giant Squid, ex-Amber Asylum, Neurosis, etc.), guitarist/vocalist Max Doyle (also Walken) and drummer Zack Farwell (Giant Squid, Walken) worked on a theme with their third full-length and it became a landmark in my mind. I won’t take away from their first two LPs, 2007’s self-titled and 2008’s This Grand Show, or anything they’ve done since, but sometimes a band sounds like they’re playing music for your bones, and that’s me and All We Destroy. For years, I have fantasized about asking the band to play it in full on a West Coast all-dayer bill built up in no small part so I could see them play it. Maybe if I make it to 20 years.
But, Pearl and the End of Days, which, yes, is comprised of “Pearl” (10:11) and “End of Days” (17:21) was the follow-up, and if I didn’t get to know it at any point in the decade since its release, part of that might have been fear on my part that there would be something to undercut how I felt about All We Destroy. These 10 years after the fact, there’s the demonstrable evidence of the subsequent two Grayceon albums as evidence that didn’t happen, but the songs themselves are their own best argument, the former a vague but poetic, personal-feeling lyric that begins with an atmospheric stretch of far-back vocals and watery guitar strum with drum thud until at 1:41 the first scream hits, the guitar sheds the effect in favor of a recognizably pointed tone that seems to emphasize the jabbing style of Doyle‘s riffing and the odd pulled note here and there, tremolo squibblies, galloping, slamming into a wall of doom, whatever it might be.
A wistful harmony holds over tempestuous metal, but Grayceon are never out of control, and they never lose their poise as they build (note the drum fill starting at 4:20 and lasting the next 15 seconds; every member of this band is a beast on their respective instrument) into an increasingly intense nod before mellowing back to the intro — Farwell‘s toms notwithstanding — until another scream marks the change toward the song’s final movement, which slows after the speedup into a graceful vocal melody with answer from the cello and guitar, riding a steady groove to a purposeful finish.
The held-out stops that mark the beginning of “End of Days” are a familiar element from elsewhere before and since — if you can make doom sound like that, you do — but the verse soon enough bursts to life from the flowing intro, the lyrics telling a story about, you guessed it, the world ending. Where IV stripped back some of their longform impulses — perhaps in response in some way to this EP and the album before it — Mothers Weavers Vultures would be similarly apocalyptic thematically around climate change, but “End of Days,” as it seems to unfold instrumentally and get bigger and bigger over its first few minutes until Gratz at 4:50 lays it out: “We will all die.”
Yes, yes, we’re all going to die. So my existential angst tells me. But the twist comes as the giant rock careens — “rolls,” and you see where this is going — toward the eventual crash into Earth, the song calls out for longhairs to unite and rock and roll through the end of all things. The last verse completes the urging: “Play your song and play it loudly for all the world to hear/Long Hairs united — what’s left to fear?/So synchronize, harmonize/Find some peace in our demise/As the rock rolls closer, let’s turn up louder.” They do, incidentally. Grayceon might on occasion break out blastbeats, and they do in “End of Days” as well as part of a multi-tier crescendo that’s headspinning in its solo shred circa the 15-minute mark before — and again the drums are also insane — turning to a more open groove before a well earned and kind of showy finish builds to a full-sounding crush and, having gotten there, cuts to silence.
The point being made, then, is that if you’re gonna go anyway, do what you love, and that’s about as agreeable a message as one might read into a thing. I don’t know that I’ll ever get to see this band, let alone get to see them play any of their offerings in full, but if you believe in a “well kept secret, I have to think Grayceon are an epitome of the idea, and 10 years and several others later, this particular apocalypse continues to resonate. And I don’t always do this, but Grayceon‘s Bandcamp page is here. Do yourself a god damned favor and get on board.
Thanks for reading. As always, I hope you enjoy.
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Aside from all the Grayceon, it was just kind of a regular week. The Pecan has made it through four days of school without an incident bad enough that I had to pick her up and bring her home — and that includes waving scissors in some kid’s face — which I still mark as a triumph even if I’m a little superstitious about doing so since today hasn’t happened yet. It’s 6:34AM now. I got up a few minutes before five, took the dog out, got coffee, settled in, etc. She’s been staying up later so sleeping later as well. It’s a tradeoff, but there are definitely times I just wish she could go to bed when told. Or do anything when told. But there are also times I just wish I could go to bed too, so take that as you will.
We have an eval this morning scheduled with a psychiatrist, which is another avenue toward hopefully getting the ADHD diagnosis on paper as we very desperately need. I have little faith in really any element of the American healthcare system and expect we’ll still be chasing down meds as she’s entering first grade next year. It’s a process, they say. They don’t tell you that 70 percent of the process is jumping through hoops so you can visit every specialist in the Atlantic Health System, basically buying seven different flavors of Coke trying to get to the one you knew you wanted in the first place. I could go on here.
But, oh, that would be political! Politics! I said on Facebook the other day that there should be a general strike — which is absolutely something I believe — and a couple folks got mad about it. “Fuck you I gotta go to work” and so on. The US has done a really good job of reinforcing class structure by making people believe this in their soul. Humans survived thousands of years without capitalism, and an economic system is not an evolutionary product. People, in this case a few rich white men serving their own interests, sat down and decided it was what would best do that. And here we are. I can’t get my kid the help she needs today because the company that owns local doctoring has decided we haven’t been to enough doctors. It all ties together. It is not a conspiracy. It requires no special brain to see. It’s in the fucking newspaper.
While we’re here, active genocide makes a kind of morose backdrop for daily existence, but it’s nothing new, if perhaps additionally sad for my home country’s active role in it. When the US was about to go to war for two decades for basically nothing, France stepped up and was like, “Yo mate, that’s fucking dumb.” And they were right, even if it meant stadiums served “freedom fries” for however many years after. I wish America could have been so good a friend to Israel.
Not enough to do anything about it, though, which blocks me in with just about everyone else on the planet except those doing either the fighting or dying. And you know what? I could go on here too, about all this shit and plenty more, but I gotta go get my kid’s poodle skirt on because it’s the 50th day of school and they’re doing a 1950s theme, of course, and she’ll go after the aforementioned eval. My trajectory today is whatever gets me to rotisserie chicken and as much Zelda as possible, and expect much of the weekend to be spent getting ready for Thanksgiving next week, which we’re hosting as we will. A shower and a Hungarian lesson in the app will be bonuses if I can get there.
I hope you have a great and safe weekend. Have fun, hydrate, watch your head, rock out to the drain around which we’re all swirling. Whatever gets you through the day, just be nice.
FRM.
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Tags: California, Grayceon, Grayceon Pearl and the End of Days, Oakland, Pearl and the End of Days, The Flenser
My grandparents and great aunt used to speak in Hungarian when they didn’t want us to know what they were talking about. When someone yawned they would say (in Hungarian) “When the jackass brays, it’s going to rain”.