In the past couple of years, there’s been nowhere to turn for intellectual songcraft outside of the underground. Whether on the charts or in the ruins of different scenes, emotions much like lottery numbers have been on a rollercoaster in the 2020s leading a lot of critics to start calling this decade the dawn of post-romantic surrealism, and listening to a record like Shadow Breaker makes me want to agree with the branding. There’s something very cold and calculated about the very notion of swagger in this instrument-heavy new album from The Grunions, and yet its greater narrative seems to cackle at any concept that would leave emotions anywhere but at the center of the storytelling.
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In the title cut, “Keep It Sh’Breezee,” and “Pink Manta” alone, The Grunions makes a strong pitch for being one of the best indie acts cutting an LP out of their immediate scene this summer, and it starts and ends with their sensible approach to pop song structures. The post-psychedelic sludge is bleeding into a lot of balladic moments between “Pink Manta” and “Ophiuchus Spector,” but it’s limited within a commitment to retro compositional and studio constructs give us consistency – and adrenaline – throughout the whole of the album.
Even when The Grunions are coming at us harder than they have to with a harmony, such as in “Magnet Head” and the epic “Chester’s Thing,” our guitarist specifically sounds really relaxed and completely at ease with the pace of the music and the melodies he’s doing so much to shape without leaning on the bottom-end in the mix. Whether offering us loss or longing, there’s some confidence in this melodic wit that doesn’t usually translate with the same hearty tone that it seems to in Shadow Breaker, which is reason enough to give the complete tracklist a whirl.
To me, this LP feels like it was made for repeat listens. There are layers to the sonic dynamic in “FOOTPLATEMAN” and “Showdown – Tango on Titan” that simply take more than a couple of sessions to understand, and not only because of the way their beats unfold. I think you’ve got to let the music sink into your soul independently of the tempo and then judge the content of what’s being sung to us from that place, which is essentially to say that understanding the independence of context in this record is to appreciate the character of the songs it contains.
I can’t speak for the longtime fans of The Grunions, but I think this album was worth spending a little extra time to get perfectly right and sounds a bit fuller than the act’s biggest rivals have done in their recent releases. This is a realization of ideas rather than uncertain stabs at experimentalism, which isn’t to say that The Grunions hasn’t known what they’re doing this whole time. Instead, they’ve found their groove and are using it to bring forth a substantially more stimulating listen than alternative fans are going to find when scanning the Billboard charts at the moment.
Garth Thomas