Album Review: Justin Scott Gray- Adult Music
So just who on earth is Justin Scott Gray?
Well, after the debacle that was my unfortunate, tragicexperience with Cassette Store Day, one of my tweets w/r/t the event was
favorited by a cassette blog and podcast site named Tabs Out.
On their site, along with articles, is a running list of new
cassette releases—no reviews. And really no information on them. Just the
catalog number, and a link to the label that put them out. It just goes on for
pages and pages—it’s like a labyrinth.
After doing a little clicking around, and a little sampling
of things on Bandcamp, I came across the new release from Canadian artist
Justin Scott Gray, Adult Music.
Gray runs the independent label Amok Recordings—and pretty
much every release he’s put out involves either himself, his wife, or both of
them working together. And nearly every release he puts out falls into a
different musical genre. The whole label’s Bandcamp page is overwhelming to say
the least.
Adult Music, as a
title, I feel like is a bit of a tongue-in-cheek wink to the concept of what
music adult should be listening to. The album is heavy on banjos, lush strings,
somber organs, and brushed percussion. It’s also gorgeous and incredibly
heartbreaking. In this post-Bon Iver world where we live, when anyone with a
4-track recorder can get sad and go into the woods and come out with some
self-recorded melodrama, it’s refreshing to hear something that could fall into
that category that is able to maintain some weight.
Musically, Adult Music
reminds me more of a random record from my past—Anchor Details by Quintin Nadig. My friend Liz took a chance on it
once when we were in college—it was sitting in our record store’s listening
carousel for who knows how long. Sparse
and fragile, Nadig fell off the map after recording only two albums, and living
in a pre-Facebook, pre-Bandcamp world, he’s left little trace of himself
behind. In listening to Gray’s record here, I am thankful that he
(unintentionally I'm sure) has picked up that same raw, emotional torch.
I mean the first half of this record is instrumental and it
is so fucking real. I'm not even joking. THERE ARE NO WORDS ON THESE SONGS and
they are ridiculously touching. I don't know how he does it. But Justin Scott
Gray does it. And whether it’s an intentional trick or not, by the time the
album does arrive at the halfway point, where Gray begins singing—“I used to write, and now, I barely even
speak,” he whispers on a song, aptly titled “I Used to Write.” Also, this lyric hits incredibly close to home, so it would fall into the #realtalk category.
“I Used to Write,” is one of two songs out of the eight that
include lyrics—musically, it picks up the intensity and pacing quite a bit.
Ramshackle cymbal crashes and percussion call the shots over somber piano
chords and slight atmospherics. “Circles” is the other track to include vocals
from Gray—half whispered, spidery sounding, reminiscent to Elliott Smith at
times.
The final two instrumental pieces on the record, “There is a
Fog,” and “ When in Rome,” teeter into post-rock territory; the former’s slow,
tremoloy guitar strums eventually overtaken by patterns of noise and static;
the latter, a full on Mogwai style quiet/loud/quiet assault.
As a whole, because it eventually jumps around
stylistically, Adult Music lacks
complete cohesion from start to finish. The first four songs though are pretty
much flawless—Gray creating the kind of environment in music you rarely hear,
specifically on songs like “Everyone Wants to Go Home,” and “An Evening Waltz,”
which are as just about heartbreaking as you can get.
Of the few releases on Amok that Gray has released under his
own name, this is the most mature (or Adult)
effort. I’m hoping that this is a direction he continues to pursue in the
future.