Corridors of Power: 20 Years with Grails

It’s not exactly 20 years since Grails released their debut album, The Burden of Hope. In fact, it’s 19 days short of that. 7,294 days of being immersed in the world of Grails.  

Grails are like an abstract painting. An abundance of room for critique and interpretation. Take a song such as the aptly titled Stoned at the Taj Again – one of the many ways to construe a band that has constantly reinvented themselves over the years.

While post-rock spawned many tropes of lackluster nature, Grails weren’t one of them. At the first time of listening to this very day, the question is how on earth they were ever a part of the post-rock equation? Again, those fine margins for assessment and clarification.

Grails have always produced music of a forward-thinking nature, conceived from shifting sands, with the results equally slow-burning and wonderfully ambiguous.

If anything, Grails could be considered the mongrel offspring of John Fahey and Ravi Shankar. Formed in Portland, Oregon in 1999 as Laurel Canyon by the band’s constant threads, Emil Amos and Alex Hall, the pair have always held a constant hunger for obscurity throughout the history of music.

James Ellroy once suggested that you can’t teach writing. You just have read, read and… read. When it comes time to the writing part, you either have it or you don’t. In a musical sense, the Grails story feels much like that. A cerebral acumen brought about by an incessant willingness to learn the craft, not just musically but simply through the idea. Years indulging the art form, studying its origins throughout the different eras until that specific time comes to project and commit to the idea. And Amos and Hall, with the help of a revolving cast over the years, have made every post a winner.

Through their detailed findings, Grails have possessed a narcotic blend of psychedelia, kraut-rock, and everything in between. From Can to Sun City Girls, essentially Grails have been the overlords of a new world order for outliers and cratediggers alike in a career that has seen the band straddle esoteric sound worlds.

Full Force: In Conversation with Holy Sons’ Emil Amos – Part 1

Perhaps the Grails story is best represented through the thick miasma of the epic six volume compilations series, the Black Tar Prophecies. Incidentally, it doesn’t include the above-noted …Taj’ – a song that featured on the 2008 release, Take Refuge in Clean Living, which contained remnants of the band’s most vital chapter (more on that in a bit).

The Black Tar Prophecies series is a chemical-induced rabbit hole where we are met with the band’s most drug-inspired sounds. It’s essentially where they pull the listener through the haze of a Turkish hash den that proves the essential backdrop to these songs.

A band who has always broadened the scope, how did it all begin? Following their formation in 1999, four years later Laurel Canyon changed their name to Grails in conjunction with the release of their debut LP, The Burden of Hope via Steve Von Till’s Neurot Recordings. The album celebrates its 20th anniversary on October 7, just two weeks after the release of the band’s latest dispatch, Anches En Maat, out this Friday through Temporary Residence – the label that, despite what its name suggests – has been the band’s spiritual home.

Both releases worthy bookends to this intoxicating story, the Grails story began with the line-up consisting of Amos (drums), Hall (guitar), Timothy Horner (violin), William Slater (piano, bass) and Zak Riles (guitar), the latter who was an integral part of the band before parting ways in 2018.

The Burden of Hope saw Grails bottle up all the findings from their formative years and present it in a way that still maintains artistic relevance two decades later. Look no further than In the Beginning and The March – balladeering serenades created by musicians possessing a nous and virtuosity beyond their years.

Meanwhile, the opening title and Space Prophet Dogon harness the kind of woodsy grooves that sound like the Dirty Three colliding with a Neil Young jam; the crunching choruses based around Amos’ tumbling assaults from behind the kit proved (and still do) the band’s greatest boon. His drumming, one of the most distinguishable in modern music.

Through song titles such as Lord I Hate Your Day, Grails showcased the sense of humour they’ve maintained throughout the years. Subtle provocateurs and steadfastly cynical of a world that becomes stranger by the day, the only way to escape a world hell-bent on conformity is to create your own, and Grails have been the masters of it.

Like the sun creeping over the horizon, Broken Ballad is perhaps fractured in its own way, but the beauty is found within the fissures, exposing a cinematic lust that, just like the doom folk dread of The Deed and twisted harmonics of Invocation and White Flag, Grails would explore in greater depth during later releases.

Full Force: In Conversation with Holy Sons’ Emil Amos – Part 2

The shining beacon of The Burden of Hope arrives during its final stanza, namely the crippling majesty of Canyon Hymn. One of the closing tracks of the ’00s era, Canyon Hymn particularly holds a special place in my heart, for it was the track my late wife walked down the aisle to when we were married in 2014. Here Grails capture an emotional tenderness unlike any of their peers, and even to this day, I don’t see them committing a more tender passage of music to tape.

The Burden of Hope was the rock on which the Grails story was built. Redlight followed 12 months later, which closely aligned to The Burden of Hope in aesthetic, before the band broke away to create the shiniest jewel in their crown, Burning Off Impurities. A recorded steeped in fractured folk reverence, dismantling the ideas of Polvo and Shankar in what was a potent brew of psychedelic sorcery, it remains one of the key pillars of new music since the turn of the century.

From here the band still maintained their shape-shifting relevance via the aforementioned Take Refuge in Clean Living, the Floydian-tinged Doomsdayer’s Holiday (both 2008) and the equally thrilling Deep Politics (2011), before taking another left-field turn in 2017 with the blissed-out, dreamscape-heavy Chalice Hymnal.

Which leads us to the latest chapter of the weighty Grails tome, Anches En Maat.

Six years in the making, Anches En Maat drips with a fever-dream residue that takes days trying to piece together abstract thoughts. Essentially, it’s another facet of this ever-evolving concern.

In many ways, to reach the core of Anches En Maat involves another dalliance of sorts, and it’s in the way of Emil Amos’ latest solo release, Zone Black, which helps unblock the arteries that lead to the record’s vital organs.

With the current Grails line-up featuring Jesse Bates, Ilya Ahmed and AE Pattera (Zombi, Majeure) alongside Amos and Hall, Anches En Maat begins with Sad & Illegal. Oozing with languid riffs and a stirring string section from Timba Harris (Sunn O))), Secret Chiefs 3), from the outset Grails zero in on the cinematic aspects of Chalice Hymnal. There’s a richer cadence here, though, and with new angles of Deep Politics’ warped western drama and the soap opera of Amos and Hall’s Lilacs & Champagne odyssey, it all forms a new off-kilter backdrop to Anches En Maat.

The filmic blur of Viktor’s Night Map follows, and later with Black Rain, Amos’ fleeting percussion rides along breezy synths and psych-inspired riffs that bubble underneath the mix.  

Then there’s Sister of Bilitis. The prequel to Deep Politics’ Daughters of Bilitis, Sister of Bilitis is a creeping, black acid nightmare brimming with John Carpenter-reverence, where a misty imagery forms that is likened to being dragged up to Dracula’s Castle by his henchman. Here Grails capture the horror frame-by-frame.

In a sea of synths, Pool of Gems creates more murky imagery, this time evoking a pre-World War II Berlin soap opera vibe, with grainy pictures of debauchery spilling out onto the streets along the Alexanderplatz.

Then there’s Evening Song. A beautiful piano-led reverie, nestled within the clefts of the Grails consciousness, embodying the same spirit that ran all the way through The Burden of Hope.

The dark mist that begins the closing title track slowly unfurls into a quiet echo of brass and soft percussion. A wash of sounds like a cascading slow-motion picture that stitches together half-forgotten dreams. It’s a fitting end to an album that shines light into once secluded parts of the Grails sound world.

Speaking to Amos earlier this year about Zone Black, and discussing the merits of artistic freedom, he said, “There’s a superpower in grasping these freedoms… and using hip-hop as an artistic opportunity, instead of just trying to find another way to make money with it, really respects the form.”   

With Grails of course, it broadens beyond any one musical style. It’s a wellspring that this band has continuously tapped in to, and Anches En Maat as much as any Grails release is an extension of that. A well-informed idea into music’s history. To me, that’s what the last 7,294 days of the Grails experience is all about. The idea.

A welcome addition to the Grails oeuvre, like other releases, Anches En Maat takes time to unlock; a clear sign of a purist band submerged in the traditions of seclusion and frozen time. Patience being a virtue, with every detail committed to tape included with reason. Something that is largely amiss in this new world of dire immediate culture and emotional superficiality that has reduced art’s ability to achieve what it’s supposed to.

It’s a new world Grails continues to experience a deep disconnection with, reaffirming their fundamental mission statement: to be world builders, continuing their march through the corridors of power where creative freedom exists in its entirety.

Anches En Maat is out Friday via Temporary Residence. Purchase from Bandcamp.

The Burden of Hope 20th anniversary reissue is out September 29 via Neurot Recordings. Purchase from Bandcamp.