Good Grief
Shake Your Faith
HAPPY HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME
While it seems silly to define and/or divide music by nationality—especially in the internet era—it’s worth noting that Good Grief are probably the best American band that aren’t from the U.S. In fact, the trio from Liverpool refer to themselves as “Hüsker Don’t” on their Bandcamp page. It’s an irreverent, tongue-in-cheek dig at themselves, but one as accurate as it is erroneous.
That’s because while this debut record—almost a decade in the making, considering the band formed in 2013—is proud to acknowledge its influences, it also builds on those foundations, just as all the best music does. So while there are slivers of Superchunk, early R.E.M., The Lemonheads, and, yes, Hüsker Dü here, these 11 songs also shimmer with their own distinct personality. And it’s a glorious shimmer at that—the dying light and the end of a perfect, drunken summer’s afternoon that you hope you’ll remember forever, but know you probably won’t.
All of which is to say the likes of “Metal Phase” and “How Can I Help Falling in Love?,” the record’s stunning opening tracks, are as wistful as they are gleeful, caught between cheerfulness and melancholy. That tension carries on throughout the album in the mathy guitar lines and melodies of the Seinfeld-referencing “The Pony Remark” and the scuzzy, fuzzy playfulness of “New Town,” as well as the slower-motion of “Dimension Jump,” which proffers existential contemplation of both the hyper-focused and hyper-widescreen varieties. Penultimate track “Hatches” is a song with a similarly large agenda, one that both lyrically and musically seems to be observing the planet from a distant spot in the galaxy that suddenly—as the song explodes in a frenzy of discordant noise—collapses in on itself.
What follows is a moment of calm almost-beauty in the form of final song “Kissing Through Curtains.” Its poignantly impressionistic lyrics and markedly lo-fi production offer a chance to take a deep breath and think for a moment—about everything or nothing, or perhaps both—before the song fades into the crackling of the faint flames of a dying fire, a subtle sonic representation of the song’s final line, and something which also signals the end of the record. Is it power-pop? Indie rock? Punk? All of the above? The answer is as irrelevant as where the band hails from. What matters is that this is a stunning debut—and one very much worth the wait.
