Review & Track Premiere: Giant Brain, Grade A Gray Day
Posted in audiObelisk, Reviews on February 15th, 2023 by JJ Koczan
[Click play above to stream Giant Brain’s new single “Fore: (Rage at the Cruelty of Forced Transhumanism).” Grade A Gray Day is out March 10 on Small Stone Records and Kozmik Artifactz.]
It is a difficult album to separate from the context in which it’s been made. Grade A Gray Day is the first offering from Detroit kosmiche rockers Giant Brain in some 14 years since 2009’s Thorn of Thrones (review here), and it arrives four years after the Jan. 2019 death of guitarist Phil Dürr, also known for his work in Big Chief, Luder, Five Horse Johnson and others. Dürr was reportedly in progress playing bass and guitar on what’s the third Giant Brain full-length — the first was 2007’s Plume, also on Small Stone — along with the brotherly rhythm section of bassist Andy Sutton (also vocals) and keyboardist/programmer Al Sutton, both of whom also produced at Rustbelt Studios in Detroit, as well as drummer/keyboardist Eric Hoegemeyer, at the time of his passing, and it is in tribute to his legacy in his home city and to him as an individual that Grade A Gray Day was completed, its six mostly-instrumental tracks holding together variously proggy and cosmic threads across an inevitably varied 41 minutes. There is a narrative thread hinted at in the titles of the songs:
1. Munich
2. Terminator: (Where an Astronaut Dies in Space)
3. The Variac: (His Consciousness Reawakens)
4. Fore: (Rage at the Cruelty of Forced Transhumanism)
5. Systems Failure: (Uprising, Destruction, and the Escape)
6. Between Trains
…and that it is as much spirit as space is appropriate for the music actually contained on the album, which is rife with guest appearances from the likes of Dürr‘s Luder bandmates Sue Lott (also of Slot, Big Chief, etc.), who sings on the meditative and melancholy closer “Between Trains” and Scott Hamilton, who adds guitar to “Systems Failure: (Uprising, Destruction and the Escape) and is the head of Small Stone Records, as well as a slew of others. Even the cover art by Mark Dancey feels like a thoughtful choice considering Dancey used to be in Big Chief. Kenny Tudrick of The Detroit Cobras plays piano on “Between Trains,” Billy Reedy of Novadriver and Walk on Water plays guitar on “Terminator: (Where an Astronaut Dies in Space),” Detroit Symphony bassist James Simonson (also Joanne Shaw Taylor) plays on “Terminator: (Where an Astronaut Dies in Space),” Bob Ebeling of Walk on Water, Five Horse Johnson and Kid Rock handles wine glasses on “The Variac: (His Consciousness Reawakens)” and drums on “Systems Failure: (Uprising, Destruction and the Escape),” Darrel Eubank adds vocals to “The Variac: (His Consciousness Reawakens)” and British Blues Award-winning guitarist Joanne Shaw Taylor sits in on “Munich” and “Fore: (Rage at the Cruelty of Forced Transhumanism),” starting each side of Grade A Gray Day with particularly righteous uptempo krautrock-meets-boogie shuffle.
On at least a couple levels, that’s pretty much the story of Grade A Gray Day. The remaining members of the band — the Suttons and Hoegemeyer — joining forces with a slew of others to flesh out what were Dürr‘s concepts and starting foundations for a third Giant Brain record. Invariably, the end result here can’t match what was the original intent — because the original intent was that Dürr would finish the album with his bandmates — but from the most basic level of its making to the likely logistical nightmare of recording all these players to the simple fact that there are so many involved, Grade A Gray Day absolutely bleeds its homage to Dürr.
More even than it’s an album, it is a love letter to Dürr as a player and a human being from his bandmates, friends and loved ones, and if you can get your head around the songs — personally, I’m still trying to figure out the colon-into-parenthetical happening in the middle four song titles, let alone the actual music, the effort you put into listen is duly rewarded. The manner in which “Munich” and “Terminator: (Where an Astronaut Dies in Space)” bop along like cosmic prog and ’70s swing have always secretly been the same thing, the weirdo repeats of “Terminator terminator” looped through that second cut a rare human voice in the outbound instrumental launch that gives over to float and laughter — presumably Dürr‘s — on the cinematic “The Variac: (His Consciousness Reawakens),” capping side A, these are rich culminations and brazen turns from one to the next, and within themselves, but it’s that love at their foundation that draws them together.
Next time you’re in need of a definition of “skronk,” the riff twisting itself around “Fore: (Rage at the Cruelty of Forced Transhumanism)” should serve nicely. Spaced out in shove early and in drift (and then shove again) later, it’s a quick summary of the stylistic blend that Giant Brain — especially considering the swath of personnel involved — make seamless while staying almost entirely pretense-free in the doing. The first couple minutes of “Systems Failure: (Uprising, Destruction, and the Escape)” are set to the backdrop of noise almost like peeping frogs, but just before 2:20, it bursts into life with a keyboard-inclusive fluidity before turning to a bigger rolling riff (presumably ‘Destruction’) and finds its freedom in shred at the finish, a six-minute jaunt through an interstellar badlands of microgenres that’s only easy to follow because your brain is already jelly.
Its ending leaves “Between Trains” with the daunting task of saying goodbye, to Dürr as well as to this album in his honor. Lott delivers a highlight performance from among the many, emotive but subdued over the ambient drones, a ticking clock that fades out, and a wash that rises and recedes into residual guitar, a last gasp of amplifier hum like they don’t want to let go. Fair. Dürr must have been a pretty special person to earn this kind of celebration of his life and creativity. Grade A Gray Day is as sincere in its realization as it possibly could be, and for that, likewise beautiful, sad, loving and — despite all its space prog psych experimentalism, all its far-far-out sounds and antigravity twists — quintessentially human.
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