Grey Hairs
Health & Social Care

You never stop discovering new bands to fall in love with. Even though I'm approaching the dreaded third age of listening*, lately I manage to find interesting groups more and more often, which, for one reason or another, have never caught my auditory radar.

This is the case with the British Grey Hairs, whose album “Health & Social Care” is released by the small Nottingham-based label Gringo Records, although they have been active since 2011. Three guys plus a gentle lady raised on pints at the pub, unemployment benefit checks, and repeated listens to the best '90s noise rock. You would expect an album that goes straight to the point, without any frills, and at first glance it might seem so. But as you listen further, it reveals a great variety, and less obvious solutions than you would expect from a band with such an easily categorizable and recognizable sound.

The general coordinates are those of the painful riffs of the best Jesus Lizard, hybridized with early Nirvana (exemplified by the initial and screamed “Hydropona”), or even the American punk sound that has Fugazi written in big letters (“Piss Transgressor”). But the less bombastic episodes are the best: the restless and almost horror film-like progression of “Tory Nurse”, the At The Drive-In style falsetto in “Breathing In Breathing Out”, the '90s Scandinavian garage punk of “Kernels Of Eyes”, and the never praised enough English band Mc Lusky in “Ghost In Your Own Life”.

Not a note out of place in the 38 minutes of the album. Concise, direct, and disenchanted. As everyone should be in this crappy 2019.

*approximately after 25 years of thoughtful listening, dictated not by the radio but by one's own personal taste, you are at the limit of your listening potential with an open ear; eventually, one becomes an “old” listener and increasingly unwillingly leaves their acoustic comfort zone.