Album Review: Grayceon, Then the Darkness
Like a salve for troubled times, Grayceon dig in at an unprecedented level. Some 20 years after the San Francisco, California, trio’s founding — their lineup, with cellist/vocalist Jackie Perez Gratz, guitarist Max Doyle and drummer Zack Farwell, has been stable all the while, and each member is an essential facet of the band’s persona — and five years after their last LP, 2020’s Mothers Weavers Vultures (review here), they offer Then the Darkness (on Translation Loss and the band’s own We Can Records).
At 81 minutes and 11 tracks, it is pointedly all-in; nearly twice as long as the album before it, and a cascade through sounds alternately beautiful and harsh as Grayceon bring together thrash, doom, avant-heavy progressivism of craft and melodic arrangements that, even considering the accomplishments of Mothers Weavers Vultures, doesn’t let you get through “Velvet ’79” before realizing they’ve hit another echelon in songwriting.
That they managed to fit it on a double-vinyl is impressive enough. That they managed to compose the record without collapsing under material’s own weight is more so. Consuming one of the total four sides is “Mahsa,” which is 20 minutes long, the longest the band have ever written — taking the title from “We Can,” the 17-minute epic from 2011’s evergreen All We Destroy (review here, discussed here) — and which more importantly stakes its place in the conversation of violence against women.
It is named for Mahsa (Jina) Amini, who was killed in Iran in 2022 because all gods are the provenance of evil men, and makes a refrain of the name of the movement that sprung up in the wake of her murder: “Woman, life, freedom.” Simple enough concepts in a complex world, and a song that is both expressive and mournful, wishing for a better times in the lines, “When you find me, you’ll know I am the sun,” and, with the power to give life and to nurture the boys who will one day grow up and kill more women, the lyrics ask, “What more do you want from us?,” and rightly so.
But “Mahsa,” while a quarter of the runtime, isn’t the only broad-reaching fare on offer here. Following a succession of four shorter cuts at the open, “Mahsa” gives over to the title-track, a fluid, just-over-three-minutes-long instrumental breather. On the vinyl, “Then the Darkness” is the start of side C, but for those listening in a linear format — CD/digital — it’s also a needed breather between “Mahsa” and “Forever Teeth,” which is the second of the two extended pieces at 13 minutes.
And like some of Mothers Weavers Vultures, the lyrics take on parenting and relationships, in this case about lying to your children, which I’m fairly sure everyone does at some point and all souls are damned for it, etc. Sorry, sometimes you need to say that wasn’t an ice cream place you just drove past, and the moral implications are a reasonable trade in the moment. The words “love” and “lies,” and in the payoff — which is emotional as much as aural — rather than screams, the vocals soar, almost arguing, accusing, “You/You lied first/You did/And I don’t think I’ll forgive you even a little bit,” and resolving in the penitent, “Maybe we deserve to never, never sleep again.” It’s a whole different kind of brutal.
The two longest pieces are of course standouts, and their positioning on Then the Darkness is a signal the band knew that going into making the album, but even “Three Points of Light,” which is fourth of the first-four right ahead of “Mahsa,” and thus at risk of being swallowed by it, and the shortest inclusion other than the title-track, makes an impression as the cello complements the guitar and the drums solidify and ground the twisting procession.
“Velvet ’79,” immediately before, is a nodder, smoothing out some of the darker atmosphere and crunch of “One Third” with its aggro finish, and the slow-start-into-burst “Thousand Year Storm,” using some of the last record’s environmentalist theme (that wasn’t the only thing going on there, and it’s not the only thing going on here either) to shift into the present moment. That continuity becomes the foundation for an exploration of multiple ideas, from the lights in the sky of “Three Points of Light” to the “what’s done is done is done” of “Forever Teeth,”
Meanwhile, on the other side of “Forever Teeth,” almost hidden behind the wall created by the longer songs, are four more tracks, in “Song of the Snake,” which builds tension through its midsection blastbeats before opening back up and calls for ceasefire in the doing, “Holding Lines,” on which the cello leads the breakdown, the penultimate “Untitled,” which flows sweetly and with soothing caution through its first half, picks up a bit of crush in the second, and recedes instrumentally to let “Come to the End” burst in like a moment of clarity and carry them to a consuming finish, layering clean and screamed vocals with an effective-but-not-overblown culmination leading into the last fade.
With engineering and a mix/master from Jack Shirley and a recording process of about seven months, Then the Darkness acknowledges the frenzy of the current era — this wretched, ongoing decade — and the utter lack of light on the horizon thereof by daring hope musically and lyrically, seeming to find its way as it goes. This humanity is at the core of the sound, and is the essence of what Grayceon offer at this point.
Over their two decades, they’ve never been a gung-ho, tour-for-eight-months kind of project, but whether it’s two years or five between full-lengths — the half-decade preceding is the longest stretch of their career; something which the glut of material would seem to account for — their songwriting has never stopped growing, and they’re in a position with Then the Darkness that a given track can express an idea, the next one can move on to something else, and neither is out of place for what the other is doing.
Then the Darkness is not a minor undertaking, of course, but more than the runtime, the heft of their sound and the spaces they create give it substance beyond the temporal. It doesn’t sound like a record made for this year so much as a letter to the years to come, and its resonance is a gift of craft and perspective.
Grayceon, Then the Darkness (2025)
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