Grails
Burning Off Impurities

THE REVIEW

The relationship between man and music has ancestral and deep roots. When man evolved his relationship with the natural environment and with others around him, metaphorizing the world through the first religious practices, music became a constitutive element of rituals and a ritual itself, closely linked to the mystical and religious experience in general.

In the field of shamanism, for example, the state of trance (both in its primordial forms - from the Tungus people to South America - and in its later evolutions incorporated into religious doctrines - the chanting of the Buddhist mantra and the dance of the Islamic dervishes) is induced and conveyed by music, understood in its most hypnotic sense. I say music but I mean rhythm, circular and repetitive, focused on reiteration, where the change pertains to the timbre and not to the structure.

It is striking to find such properties in a musical product of our days. The Grails (whom I was unaware of before this "Burning Off Impurities") are children of a trend, psychedelia, which is nothing but the reactualization of primordial ritual instincts. I don't want to list similar groups to which they could be compared (if I try hard, the Dead Can Dance of "Spirit Chaser" come to mind), what is important is the recovery and continuation of a way of understanding Music. To paraphrase the album's title, rather than a purifying fire we are faced with a calm ritual ablution.

The songs in "Burning Off Impurities" are almost inseparable, a concretion of fluctuating moods, mixing different timbres while remaining faithful to the original rhythmic pattern ("Outer Banks"), traversing the musical path of man diachronically and with a pan-religious (or rather transcultural) perspective, alternating harpsichord-like instruments ("More Extinction") with Middle Eastern string instruments ("Silk Rd"), up to the necessary homage to the last ritual music of the 20th century, the blues ("Dead Vine Blues").

The title track, with its calm yet solemn pace, is a worthy conclusion to this fascinating experiment straddling archaic impulses and modernist deflagrations, both mixed with extreme care, making the whole a musical unicum of rare cohesion.