Gris Gris

For The Season

(Birdman)

Record Review by Adam McKibbin

Psychedelic music, like psychedelic experience, comes dressed in all sorts of different fashions.  While a lot of “psychedelic bands” lock into one shade of the spectrum—you have your “bad trip” bands, you have your “dancing naked around the bonfire” bands—Greg Ashley and The Gris Gris ride the roller coaster.

For The Season is a reliably dense album that works best at extremes:  either you wrap yourself up in headphones (or crank the stereo up to eleven and plop in front of your lava lamp as a cinematic montage loops through your skull) or you relegate it to the background as you go about your normal everyday business.  It is not one of the middle-ground albums that will easily impress company or find itself popping into the car stereo for a quick single or two.

Structure is not eschewed, though; in fact, there is more of it than on the band’s debut.  “Down With Jesus” is a jaunty track that hints at the poppier influences in Ashley’s 60s stew (Syd Barrett, VU, etc.).  It skips along for about two and a half minutes, even encouraging listeners to clap along with the beat, and then, in a shift that is typical for the album, screeches into an electric guitar exit strategy while gradually passing the baton to the following song (the shape-shifting “Big Engine Nazi Kid Daydream”).  Ashley likes the Big Finish, and he usually manages to arrive at them organically.  Even when the lyrics are cryptic, the moody music provides enough context clues for listeners to establish emotional checkpoints. 

Right up front, “Ecks Em Eye” is a noisy, marching collage of tense guitars and orgiastic horns—and of emotionless vocals on the verses and excitable, mob-minded vocals on the chorus (“Ecks! Em! Eye!”).  On the opposite end of the album (and spectrum) is the closing title track, which builds to a sweeping orchestral climax in its center and than drifts off into peaceful, tambourine-thumping psych-pop for its remainder.  For The Season is a long, strange, yet strangely familiar trip.  For those who have worn out needles and tape decks on what came before, it’s a must-have.  Skip their peers and head straight for The Gris Gris.