Grails - 'Burning Off Impurities' (Temporary Residence) Released 23/04/07

'Burning Off Impurities' is an apt title for the Portland, Oregon four-piece's first album for revered New York label Temporary Residence. On these eight explosive tracks, Grails wipe out all traces of any disposable elements their sound may have contained in the past, landing with a lean, wildly adventurous brew that pushes instrumental rock loose of the quicksand it's been sinking into of late due to an overt reliance on knackered post-rock clichés.

Gigwise got whiff of the album at a relatively late date, but missing the release date by a few weeks doesn't matter here. Classic hard rock swagger, metronomic krautrock pulses, vintage jam band noodling, pungent psych-rock bombardments, foliage-fuelled bucolic folk, with plenty of ambient breathing space for the instruments and a touch of Tinariwen-championed ancient Saharan blues to add a non-Western twang to the unfailingly melodic proceedings, the album's main ingredients have put in way too much active duty in the last 30-odd years to become outdated anytime soon, thus sparing Grails from the rapidly ageing effects of trendiness.

Admittedly there's hardly anything radically new about these wondrous workouts - most recently, Titan have been up to something similar on their organ-fondling freak-out 'Raining Sun of Light and Love for You and You and You'. Yet the lack of cutting-edge invention doesn't turn the platter's contents into pointless pastiche. Grails may not bother the patents office much, but that's not an issue as long as the band can propel the proceedings with such an overload of explorative zeal, willingness to defy expectations and ability to startle listeners with exotic instrumentation, unfamiliar reference points (the frequent nods towards middle- and far-Eastern scales in particular work a treat) and unpredictable U-turns in mood, volume and tone.

Check out the eight-minute behemoth 'Silk Rd' as an example. Some minutes into its understated drift, half-formed and hazy like a mirage, just when the listener is lulled by a deceptive calm, the track builds into a fearsomely intense gallop seemingly dedicated to depicting the pillaging power of some mythical beast. Likewise, 'Origin-ing' switches erratically between soothing minimalism and monolithic bombast that parades the Valhalla-worthy force of primal heavy metal, only with the incessant wailing, bad poetry and cock rock strut removed. Although Grails employ similar whisper-to-amp-busting-muscle-flexing tactics regularly, the band's capabilities are by no means limited to worn-out quiet-loud dynamics. The violin-enhanced mournfulness of 'Drawn Curtains' presents a masterclass in sustained mood-building, whilst 'Dead Vine Blues' ditches amplification to showcase what Led Zeppelin might have sounded like in pedal steel-packing alt. country cowboy mode and the tense Neu! groove of 'Outer Banks' could be the sound of early Kraftwerk rolling down the autobahn with guitars instead of synths for travelling companion.

All told, 'Burning Off Impurities' is an album to restore faith in an oversubscribed genre. Don't let it pass you by.