It’s late January, the time of year when most of us have already come down from the extreme high of our holiday breaks, reached the absolute abyss that greets us immediately afterward, and leveled out just enough that we can put that all into perspective. In other words, it’s the perfect time for Toronto’s Ducks Ltd. to unleash their recording of an early single and live staple which was put to tape during the recording sessions for their recent debut LP Modern Fiction: “Shades of Grey” delves into the subject of exactly this type of cyclical depression, while putting an optimistic spin on it both lyrically and instrumentally.
“It's about the inertia of depression, and how hard it can be to break out of those cycles, but also about the pleasure of embracing that state,” vocalist Tom McGreevy explained in a press statement. “There is a certain, temporary comfort to be found in the abyss! Somewhere right before it inevitably becomes extremely awful.”
The “comfort” part of that explanation comes through much more fluently than the “abyss” part, with the song’s warm guitars and lilting vocals familiar to the LP it was cut from providing the perfect mid-winter leveling-out anthem. Hear it below.
