Going into this, I suppose I ought to acknowledge that I’m pretty much a Grayceon mark. The sounds that this trio makes, they get my brain a-sizzle. I have reviewed, with almost embarrassing frequency, Grayceon albums and those of others in their family orbit. But the way I see it, life is too short to spend your time not enjoying things that are good. Radical, I know. If you’re an impatient sort, here’s the end: Then the Darkness is a Grayceon album that, mercifully, sounds like Grayceon, who – magically – don’t sound quite like anyone else.
But sure, you want more. The California trio – in fact, the same exact trio of Jackie Perez Gratz on cello/vocals, Max Doyle on guitar, and Zack Farwell on drums since day one – plays what I have previously called “genre-agnostic but undeniably progressive heavy metal.” On this latest album, they still move purposefully through intricate overlays of cello and guitar, voice and voicelessness. But the mood is distinctly… heavy, dour, disconsolate. It’s a frequently slow, weighty, mournful sprawl of an album, and it is not particularly interested in giving the listener an easy time. Perez Gratz’s howling vocals on the opener, for example, are primal, ferocious, soul-emptying. Given the title (“Thousand Year Storm”) and lyrics (“Tell them! Tell them I am not well!”), I have a sinking feeling that she is attempting to give voice to the wounded earth itself. If that’s where you’re starting from, buddy, things are truly unwell.
This is an album that speaks – sometimes directly in its lyrics, at other times obliquely in its moods and instrumental gestures – of betrayals, disappointments, deep roiling wells of anger and pain. It is dark, wrathful, venomous – it’s also, at 79 minutes, exhausting. The band sounds tired – not in their performances, but marrow-deep tired in their affect, the kind of tired where you’ve taken just about as much shit as you think you can handle only to find life backing up an armada of shit-filled shipping containers to your doorstep. What can we do other than keep shoveling? Then the Darkness is the paradoxically comforting sound of three friends figuring out just what the hell three people can do in this world, and if it turns out all we can do is bring a little somber beauty and righteous fury into our own corner? Then by god, that’s what we do.
“3 Points of Light,” more than 15 minutes into the album, is the first song that shows even a bit of lightness. Doyle’s guitar shines off a pleasingly twangy stoner snake of a riff, which Perez Gratz eventually joins with multi-tracked cello echoing. “Velvet ‘79” could almost pass for a Sanhedrin tune, but just after the 4-minute mark its heavy resolve crumbles into a gorgeously restrained break, which only underlines the powerful, elegiac desperation of the coda. Grayceon’s long-time collaborator Jack Shirley (who has been involved in some capacity – mixing, mastering, engineering, etc. – on each of their albums) yet again captures these tones perfectly. There is essentially zero fussiness here – Farwell’s drums sound like a real human thumping drums in a room, and Doyle’s and Perez Gratz’s strings, even though they are often split between right and left channels, bleed perfectly into each other. The closest thing to studio trickery I can spot is on the outro of “Come to the End,” where Doyle’s guitar is fed through some kind of effect that almost makes it sound like a saxophone, or maybe bagpipes.
Is it possible, as a listener, to be a blank slate, an empty vessel? That is, is it ever possible to encounter an album with a purely empty mind – no expectations, no references, no prior points of comparison? As a critic, I sometimes fall into a trap of assuming we can enter that kind of space at will, where we meet the artist’s pure expression exactly as intended. That’s pretty clearly a nonsensical idea, but even if it were possible, would it be desirable? One of things I love most about music is precisely that it never exists in a vacuum: what I hear in Grayceon is necessarily filtered through a lifetime of other things I’ve heard, things I’ve read, things I have known and felt and lost and forgotten. By sheer happenstance, this year I have been spending a lot of time listening to classic blues albums – BB King, Buddy Guy, Junior Wells, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, etc. – but I have also been obsessing over the self-titled Indigo Girls album. Is it any wonder, then, that in Grayceon’s Then the Darkness I have been hearing echoes of the Indigo Girls’s evocatively literate folk-rock and the absolute gut-bucket bedrock of the dispossessed and downtrodden that is the blues? The Indigo Girls even named what I’m hearing in Grayceon: “Darkness has a hunger that’s insatiable / And lightness has a call that’s hard to hear.”
Jackie Perez Gratz turns in the vocal performance of her career on this album, mostly delivering her elliptical, cutting lyrics in her powerful, razor-sharp alto sweetness, but also stepping out into a few coruscating shrieks, a briefly operatic falsetto, and multi-tracked self-harmonies. The late-album song “Untitled” is a slowcore-indebted lullaby where her voice barely rises above a quaver. The instrumental title track, and the way it leads into “Forever Teeth,” are perhaps the album’s high point. In particular, “Forever Teeth” boasts some of the widest-ranging vocal hooks, and sees Perez Gratz get a bit freer – almost melismatic – in her delivery (especially towards the end, with the absolutely vicious line “Maybe we deserve to never, never sleep again”).
But it’s quite clear that the 20-minute “Mahsa” is intended as this album’s literal and figurative centerpiece. I cannot be certain, but the song title suggests strongly to me that it was inspired by Mahsa Amini, the young Iranian-Kurdish woman whose 2022 death from brutal police beatings in Iran for not wearing the hijab sparked massive protests and widespread outrage. The song opens quietly, pensively, with Doyle’s clean figures on the low strings and a slow plaint on the cello, but it becomes a hypnotic, incantatory pulse, with its opening phrase “I / I will kill / I will / whoever killed my sister” yielding to a pure protest sign of a chorus: “WOMAN / LIFE / FREEDOM.” Across the song’s 20 minutes, the band is absolutely locked in, but in such a way that even though it doesn’t introduce a huge number of complicated sections, it feels constantly in motion. Just when the song seems to be winding down with a delicate outro, it hits a massive note of wistful triumph at the 17-minute mark and then rides it out, sad and defiant in equal measure, trudging to meet whatever future waits over the horizon.
I don’t know that I have accurately described or captured how Grayceon accomplishes their particular alchemy on Then the Darkness, but I have a feeling that these are the sort of songs that, the first time you listen to them, you will think, “Of course! Hasn’t this song been here all along?” This does not mean they are simplistic or obvious, but rather that they feel inevitable. The tone of this bleakly beautiful album delivers on the promise of the cover photograph’s sculptural death shroud, and if there’s any succor to be found, it will be found by sitting deep in the pool of that same velvet darkness we all fear.
