Grails
Miracle Music
TEMPORARY RESIDENCE LTD
Drummer Emil Amos is best known for his membership in doom-metal/psych-rock/ambient anomalies Om. Grails—which he jelled four years before Om began, and nearly a decade before he joined that outfit—is even more out-there, and a fully instrumental ensemble, to boot. After a six-year spell in which Grails didn’t release a full-length, the gang got back together for 2023’s Anches En Maat. Now, with their follow-up LP Miracle Music, they seem to have regained the fast momentum with which they released their earlier albums and developed a pure mastery at songwriting superior to much of the material they’ve cooked up in the past.
Miracle Music is easily the most vital Grails record since 2017’s Chalice Hymnal, if not the Burning Off Impurities LP they issued a full decade before that (for the former release, Amos and Denmark-based guitarist and cofounder Alex Hall brought in collaborators AE Paterra, Jesse Bates, and Ilyas Ahmed, so Grails could reach their full experimental ambitions). With Miracle Music, they have more reason to be proud of their sound and how they collectively reached their present artistic potential. And they appear to be doing just that, having just wrapped a brief West Coast tour to build anticipation for this new miracle they’ve made.
Like Om, but obviously much mellower, Grails’ latest full-length features a meditative feel coursing through the songs’ proverbial veins. The meticulous detail with which the band etched the record indeed makes it a fitting match for a yoga studio—but just side A. The second half is where Amos and his partners stretch out and further pursue Grails’ principal aim of experimentalism. With acoustic guitars beginning the song and an ambush of sweeping soundscapes, “Harmonious Living” and “Strange Paradise” could pass for Godspeed You! Black Emperor creations. What follows, the synth- and sample-heavy “Perfect Etercuss,” captures Grails at their most riotous. The final song, the Mogwai-esque “Choir Commencement,” is an elegantly executed soft landing for the record.
“Reaching across the chasm of nothingness in the world and reaching some kind of person who needs what you do is the luckiest, greatest moment,” Amos told me back in June of 2019. “This band gives us a chance to be real with people. We’re a band that gives ourselves license to be not entertainers.” While Amos made those remarks at a time when Chalice Hymnal was Grails’ most recent album, they ring even truer on Miracle Music, a hubristic but accurate name for the band’s strongest work yet.
