Grails - 'Doomsdayer's Holiday' (Temporary Residence) Released 06/10/08

Terrifying quantities of doom and gloom, scorching desert winds, transcendental contemplation under a blanket of stars, startlingly calm prettiness. These are the wildly contrasting building blocks that Grails mould into an impressively cohesive whole on this follow-up to last year’s desert blues-inspired bull’s eye ‘Burning Off Impurities’.

‘Doomsdayer’s Holiday’ has been pitched as the band’s heaviest, most dark work yet. Which it undoubtedly is. The fact that it also showcases the US quartet’s new-found lightness of touch is what turns the platter into such an alluring offering. True, the downtuned, metallic drone of the ominous title track suggests that Grails have joined such stateside avant-metallists as Om and Sunn O))) (literally in some cases – drummer Emil Amos currently occupies the Om drumstool) in the quest to make Black Sabbath’s heaviest moments sound like bubblegum pop, whilst the eerie ‘Reincarnation Blues’ peppers the band’s nods towards Tinariwen’s desert blues with several megatons of muscle-flexing oomph, without losing track of the four-piece’s capacity to do heavy without slipping into leaden heavy-handedness.

Elsewhere, though, the band’s hitherto untapped interest in – relatively speaking – taking it easy reigns supreme. Despite its ominous origins in hiss-infested unease, the hypnotic, folk-hued ‘The Natural Man’ eases into an oasis of caressing calm, the track’s flute-fuelled lilt providing a beautiful breather from the storms raging out of control elsewhere on the album. The closing epic ‘Acid Rain’ is equally unafraid to parade Grails’s sensitive side amidst intricate guitar interplay and riffs that seek to soothe rather than unsettle. Add to this the bubbling ocean of raging freak-outs the stately riffage of ‘Immediate Mate’ melts into, reminiscent of the most kosmische outpourings of Grails’ beloved Krautrock heroes ala Ash Ra Tempel and Guru Guru, and a handful of cuts devoted to the band’s trademark psychedelically endowed hard rocking, and you’ve landed with a winningly diverse platter which, although lacking obvious peaks such the mighty ‘Silk Road’ off ‘Burning Off Impurities’, impresses with a consistent strike rate.

Some might mistake the band’s no vocals-rule (broken here with some enigmatic mutterings from Sun City Girls’s Alan Bishop) for post-rock, but what Grails actually deal in is Rock with a capital R, a gigantic, riff-worshipping beast that aims to be as monolithic and unmovable as mighty huge boulders of the stuff this kind of thing is named after, whilst providing numerous new entries to the annals of the mountain-levelling riff. It’s an oft-travelled road, signposted several decades ago by Led Zeppelin, and recently travelled with most renown by Black Mountain and Earth. It’s a sign of Grails’s substance that they manage to point out some previously unseen spots amidst this overly familiar landscape.

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