Artist: Grandfather Child
Album: Grandfather Child
Bitrate: 241kbps avg
Quality: EAC Secure Mode / LAME 3.98.4 / -V0 / 44.100Khz
Label: New West Records
Genre: Rock
Size: 75.57 megs
PlayTime: 0h 41min 34sec total
Rip Date: 2012-09-10
Store Date: 2012-09-07
Track List:
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01. Can't Seem To Forget 5:13
02. ... Gonna Have Ourselves A 4:06
Vision
03. Magical Words 3:59
04. New Orleans 4:49
05. I Would Like To Thank The 5:09
Universe/Planet Earth
06. Across Our Minds 5:36
07. Waiting For You 5:21
08. Ride That Train 3:11
09. It Shines On 4:10
Release Notes:
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ôAnd they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other
tongues.ö
Back in the æ70s and æ80s, one of the highest compliments you could pay a rocker
was to say that he or she ôhad a lot of soul.ö That was the lodestar that led on
the Stones, Led Zeppelin, and Doug Sahm.
That ideal has been under assault since the 1990s, and the sounds of Blackness
have been hard to come by in the music of non-Black performers, so hard that
their absence was famously and lengthily lamented by New Yorker critic Sasha
Frere-Jones five years ago.
After six raucous Arcade Fire singalongs in a row, and years of concerts in a
similar vein, Frere-Jones wondered in the ensuing article "A Paler Shade of
White": Where was the swing? The empty spaces? The palpable bass frequencies?
Nowhere, because, as he noted in the articleÆs subtitle, indie rock had lost its
soul, the churchified intense emotionalism and rhythmic structures that had
birthed it in the late 1940s and early 1950s and nourished it for decades
thereafter.
Grandfather Child is a band that speaks with other tongues û the old original
mother tongues of rock and roll. The thundering, jubilant dialects snatched from
the heavens above, the ones that scared old people in staid, starched 1950s
America. The ones that had bourbon-sipping, Lucky-smoking parents convinced that
their hypnotized children were under the sway of demonically possessed jungle
music and soon to succumb to Commie brainwashing.
Few 1950s artists scared square America more than Little Richard and Jerry Lee
Lewis, two wild-eyed products of the Southern Pentecostal church, both of whom
infused their music with the wild raptures of their childhood Sundays.
While their sound is shot through with many a wild rapture and mighty-flowing
passages of hands-in-the-air elation, Grandfather Child is no hidebound
roots-rock band. Theirs is a refreshingly contemporary, modern update on rock
and rollÆs Pentecostal essence.
On its journey from the source, their train has picked up swirling psychedelia,
blues and bluesy metal, sumptuous neo-soul, snatches of twang, and modern Black
gospel. Most of all, thanks to vocalist/steel guitarist Lucas Gorham, the band
is suffused with sacred steel, the jubilant form of gospel spotlighted in the
2000s by Arhoolie Records and brought to the mainstream by Robert Randolph. (Not
to mention resolutely unsecular and artistically more significant artists such
as Calvin Cooke, the Lee Boys, and the Campbell Brothers.)
Backed by all-stars of the resurgent Houston music scene in
multi-instrumentalists Ryan Chavez and Geoffrey Muller, Grandfather ChildÆs
expansive sound travels from the blues-y Bourbon Street-meets-the-British Black
Country of the sludge metal, shrieking-steel dirge ôNew Orleansö to the rare
lysergic air at the boogie mountaintop of ôàGonna Have Ourselves a Vision.ö
MullerÆs hillbilly banjo mantra kicks off ôIÆd Like to Thank the Universe /
Planet Earth,ö and after traversing some clouds of GorhamÆs steel guitar joy,
the song culminates in a prodigious Hendrixian apocalypse. The call-and-response
rave-up ôRide That Trainö is an express to Sacred Steel Valhalla; far better to
buy a ticket and hop aboard and enjoy the ride than to try to stand in its way.
As adept as he is at wailing and shredding, Gorham is equally adept at
stateliness and majesty in both his singing and playing. Grandfather Child is at
its most lush on mid-tempo, Rhodes-adorned, string-laden babymakers like the
swellingly anthemic ôAcross Our Minds,ö the spring-shower of purple rain that is
ôCanÆt Seem to Forget,ö the funky Philly-style strings-meet-harmonies of
ôMagical Words,ö and the utterly lovely (and utterly well-sequenced) album
closer ôIt Shines On.ö
ThereÆs an earned authenticity at play in Grandfather ChildÆs soul. Gorham has
played in modern black gospel bands in inner-city Houston for several years, and
between sessions and rehearsals, HoustonÆs lively urban contemporary and gospel
radio stations riveted the entire band. Grandfather ChildÆs music is a sound
created by immersion, not emulation. That experience also suffuses the bandÆs
legendary live shows, spectacles equally to the world and to the angels and to
men and women.
When music is performed just right, with fervency and ecstasy, it really is the
next best thing to heaven. It can make a man feel stronger, and a woman feel
more natural. It will yank you out of hell and all the way to paradise, so long
as you give it a little bit of soul.
û John Nova Lomax