Grails
Redlight

My fotolog isn't working. Or rather, none of them are working; of course, unless all the Brazilians have banded together to dominate even more in this whirlwind system of interpersonal relationships based on daring photos, less daring, mock-bohemian, mock-artistic, truly beautiful, passable, past and smoothies. What better occasion, then, to detach myself for a moment from the catharsis that had me foaming at the mouth and hands glued to the mouse 24 hours a day waiting for some unsuspecting Spanish-speaking person to comment on one of my latest photos.

Album to review? Definitely the Grails. Yes yes, them precisely, those who paint the eyes of the crowd at any country festival. A traveling feast of races, where fragments of music from every corner of the world, whether of oriental inspiration, terribly country or more Europhile, but always and in any case folk, clash, penetrate each other and mix into an indefinable blend of cultures. All of this, however, is revised and corrected by a abundant dose of post-rock, which in this case, also because of the instruments used, recalls the music of GYBE, even though the times are significantly reduced, rather than that of Giardini di Mirò (assuming that Giardini di Mirò do post-rock).

The tracks are entirely instrumental, they start off quietly only to indulge lasciviously in irresistible crescendos, or in some cases meander towards solutions more appropriate to a jam session among friends, perhaps among the most successful episodes, in which none of the musicians seems to be in a hurry to conclude the song or necessarily keep the unwitting listener glued to the speakers with harmless virtuosity or easy melodies. On the contrary, it is easy to hear them abandon themselves to total anarchy of playing, navigating the keys of their instrument as during a stream of consciousness, chasing inspiration, or simply sketching something to ward off boredom with a few tunes.

Simple, poor, rustic music, without the pretense of amazing the crowds, and perhaps precisely because of this, so original. Music that smells of times gone by, without being Mulino Bianco style(ized), made of chords as the Good Lord demands, Do, Re, and all their little friends, made with instruments covered in a layer of dust, made by guys who unknowingly construct a wonderful Noah's Ark of traditional music under the influence of heavy hallucinogens, who unknowingly instill in all of this a terrible and dark, melancholic loneliness. How to hope for joy, indeed, under a sky dripping with shreds of red light?