“Saturday Morning,” the first song that we encounter in the new extended play The Singles Project from Robert Miller’s Project Grand Slam, rises from the silence ready to take a hearty but thoroughly smooth swing at anyone and anything that comes between the band and the audience they’re looking to captivate with their mystical melodies.
The Singles Project is no more than two minutes into its running time, and already it controls every motion of its listeners through little more than a velvety groove and a sweet vocal from Miller himself that interweaves itself with the adjacent harmony as though the two were always meant to be together in some divine sonic union.
URL: https://www.projectgrandslam.com/
“Like Never Before” and “New Wind” later follow and continue to press the fusion surrealism of their predecessor forward with a light rhythmic beat that could make even the hardest hearts of stone melt on the spot, and though it feels a bit more complex compositionally than “Saturday Morning” does, the textures of the two complement each other far more than they contrast. Project Grand Slam is riding a wave of retro-inspired pop onto the horizon in their new EP, and for those of us who have been looking for something fresh out of the indie underground this autumn, it couldn’t be arriving at a more pivotal moment this October.
A juggernaut of postmodernity finds itself boxed into an erudite pop song in the form of “She Always Draws a Crowd” that could lull babies to sleep as easily as it could transport older listeners into a foreign universe of exquisite harmonies, each seemingly saturated with more grandeur than the one that came before it, but while I loved the existential glow of this track, I found myself much more intrigued by the firestorm of grooves that rains down on us in “The Ship” even after repeated listening sessions with The Singles Project.
“The Ship” sounds and feels like something the 60s might have penned before falling away to the history books, and under the direction of Project Grand Slam, it delivers the thunderbolt of tonality that it was born to dish out flawlessly. I’ve never been a gambler, but if I had to make a wager on whether or not this band put some considerable time and effort into making The Singles Project sting both musically and lyrically, I’d put some serious money on their having devoted all of themselves to this project long before it ever left the recording studio.
Project Grand Slam’s latest cut comes to a stunning conclusion on the back of “Like Never Before,” which both encapsulates the essence of the other songs on the extended play and offers us a glimpse into the soft beats this group could submit in future efforts. The Singles Project isn’t nearly as artificial in substance nor style as its title might imply to some consumers this October, but rather an authentic take on the future of fusion that you won’t find replicated anywhere else in the underground or the mainstream anytime soon, and in my book, it’s an out of the park homerun for the players who conceived it.
Garth Thomas