Album Review: Terry Gross, Huge Improvement
With a sound so impeccably Californian it sounds like it’s skate-surfing itself on a Back to the Future II hoverboard, San Francisco’s Terry Gross — guitarist/vocalist Phil Manley, bassist/vocalist Donny Newenhouse and drummer Phil Becker — offer much more than encouraging self-assessment on their second long-player, Huge Improvement. In relation to their 2021 debut, Soft Opening (review here), the new four-track/34-minute semi-cosmic burner answers a few pivotal questions more or less immediately.
Foremost, it proves Terry Gross — who cheekily borrow their moniker from the host of National Public Radio’s “Fresh Air” interview program, produced at WHYY in Philadelphia — aren’t a one-off, which since Newenhouse and Manley (the latter also of Trans Am) are owners of El Studio, where the likes of Hot Lunch, Mammatus, Moon Duo and scores of others have recorded, and Becker (also also Trans Am) is the house engineer at El Studio who in the last year-plus alone has produced albums for the likes of Mondo Drag, Haurun and Carlton Melton, they very easily could have been. They are not lacking for other things to do, any of them.
Starting with a kind of wakeup groan, or maybe some disbelief as you drive by the shop depicted on the cover — reportedly a real place selling, you guessed it, stuff made out of hides — “Sheepskin City” commences a rush that seems to continue front-to-back. It doesn’t, actually, but within the first 90 seconds of the album, Terry Gross have pushed a kind of cosmic mania, the guitar spacing out as the drums propel the overdrive. The opener’s intro is all very tightly wound, very dug in, and gives a hint at some of the jammier thrust that Huge Improvement will foster later on, if not necessarily in the 12-minute galaxy-churner “Full Disclosure.”
Like “Sales Pitch,” which follows, and “Effective Control,” which closes the record after the big slowdown and noise-laced march in said penultimate cut, “Sheepskin City” is over seven minutes long but less than eight, and that’s likely a result of how the songs were built out of the jams and on the riffy foundations upon which they seem to be based rather than something that was implemented consciously on the part of Newenhouse, Becker and/or Manley. Certainly it’s not impossible for them to have said, “okay, we’re gonna have three seven-minute songs and one 12-minute song” — it would be weird but appropriate enough to the spirit of the proceedings, and you never know when bands have producers in the lineup; it’s arguable that a level of self-awareness if part of the point if you want to go by the LP titles — but either way, it gives the album a shape and something of a symmetry from the listener’s standpoint, highlighting the departure in the longer piece while seeming to understate the shifts in character between the others.
If that comes off feeling clever, there are a multitude of instrumental twists and turns of phrase in the sometimes-harmonized vocal melodies to back up Terry Gross giving actual consideration to this material, and the progressivism that emerges as a result of this doesn’t come at the expense of the songs. The sheer technical ability to pull off some of what they do is tempered by verse and chorus melodies holding a catchy track together as something more than a self-indulgent wank. The already-mentioned Mammatus are a partial comparison point for the shimmer in Terry Gross‘ guitar, and from Big Business to Psychic Trash, the urgency with which even the more lumbering descent in “Sales Pitch” is executed is definitively West Coast punk-rooted capital-‘h’ Heavy. There is no mistaking it. A band from where I live couldn’t sound like Huge Improvement if they wanted to, and everybody here is too angry and cold to try.
This sense is further reinforced with a penchant for over-the-top shred that’s as likely to manifest on snare drum as guitar and feels feels born of an Earthless influence, but again, met with Terry Gross‘ more individualized songcraft, finding a middle-ground between taut structuralizing and songs-as-excursion freakouttery, carving a niche for the band despite the familiarity of some of the elements being put to use. The way “Sales Pitch” resolves its earlier frantic space boogie with a bassline-led comedown in the second half after a particularly fervent build is consuming and brims with purpose as Manley‘s guitar reaches into an echo chamber of squibblies and Newenhouse carries a complementary melody to gradually lull Becker‘s drums into the slower final movement, a showcase for the vocals punctuated by thud and crash. “Full Disclosure” is suitably all-in, languid with a threatening rumble that builds into a ground-scorch of feedbacking guitar undulations, and the groove becomes a deceptively patient flow into addled bliss. That it’s all so Californy in style is the beginning of what’s working about it, not the sum total.
It’s probably noteworthy too that the members of Terry Gross have also contributed in a variety of fashions to that impression — i.e., the sound of heavy CA — over the last however many years/decades, but that’s less immediately relevant in part because Huge Improvement, thankfully, feels fresh in its approach and balance. The hard, clear strum of “Effective Control” and the vocal melody that sits on top once the riff is established are a willful re-grounding after “Full Disclosure,” righteous in their showcase of dynamic and calling back to the energy and at-full-impulse engagement of the record’s launch in “Sheepskin City,” but able to leave off with both a more memorable hook and a psychedelic-wash finish with Becker‘s galloping snare punching through.
There’s a lot happening in that finale and the album more broadly, but Terry Gross are right there the whole time, brighter in resonance and encouraging the listener to keep up as much as possible. The level of activity will be too much for some heads not wanting to be spun — so it goes — but Huge Improvement gives more in terms of the band declaring themselves, revealing Soft Opening as tentative in a way the title spoke to, and is exciting for what it might portend as well as its own accomplishments. If they continue on this trajectory, it will be fascinating to learn what they decide to call the next one, but there’s plenty to chew on here in the meantime, and more revealed with each runthrough. I liked Soft Opening, so I won’t disparage it by saying Huge Improvement lives up to its title — admittedly, it’s arguable — but it does make Terry Gross feel both underhyped and deeper in their knowledge of who they are as a group. They just might knock you on your ass, but they’ll also stick out a hand to help you up after.
Terry Gross, Huge Improvement (2024)
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