Birds in Row
Gris Klein
RED CREEK
ABOVE THE CURRENT
In their 13 years of existence, French experimental post-hardcore trio Birds in Row have only released three albums. There was 2012’s You, Me & the Violence, 2018’s We Already Lost the World, and now there’s Gris Klein. Sure, there have also been a few EPs, but listen to any of those three full-lengths and their creative and visceral intensity should make it obvious why the band’s output has been anything but abundant. The 11 songs that comprise Gris Klein are no different. Not just the sound of a dying world, but a world being deliberately destroyed for profit by the powers that be, this record is a magnified reflection of the grotesqueries of modern life and society—the way the natural essence of humanity has been corrupted, and almost obliterated, by the systems we humans have erected and chosen to blindly follow all the way to their self-destructive ends.
Its lyrics were written during the early stages of the pandemic, when the world as we once knew it was plunged into a dark uncertainty never previously encountered in this lifetime. Both the words and the music dive headfirst into the dysfunction and distress that spread like a virus as a result of the actual virus. It’s uncomfortable, unsettling, uncompromising, but even through the coruscating dissonance that dominates these songs, there is some semblance of beauty, hope, and defiance. Nevertheless, if anything, those instances are so rare that it drills home the fact—despite initial hopes that maybe such collective trauma would make people kinder—that this beauty, hope, and defiance is almost always drowned out, defeated, denied.
Gris Klein is also one of those records that works best listened to as an album. The whole thing, just like life itself, is one connected experience, an ongoing process of existence and existing. It’s a brutal journey that starts with the belligerent melancholy of “Water Wings” and ends with “Secession” and its defeatist acknowledgement that, despite everything, we’re still on the wrong track. In between, the punk-charged, nihilistic blast of “Confettis” reveals hard truths about, well, everything (“And you watch, and you suffer,” spit the lyrics in a desperate rage, before, a few lines later: “May the fire take us all”) while “Noah” starts off as a (relatively) mellow spoken-word track before incinerating itself to become an urgent fireball of unhinged noise.
Elsewhere, “Trompe l’oeil” is an almost tender, self-recriminating confessional that then flows into the unrelenting lyrical and musical torment of “Rodin,” while the bleak poetry of “Winter, Yet” and its musical frenzy—simultaneously warm and comforting, frozen and unforgiving—sounds like the world collapsing in on itself. Gris Klein is art imitating life imitating art imitating life and so on, ad infinitum, until there is no distance between either except the gaping black hole of unexistence that lies at its cold, dead center.
