Grails

Grails is a band most easily described as "restless". They've stubbornly pushed against the staid cliches of instrumental music and towards new sonic frontiers, creating heavily textured albums, stacked deep with epic song hooks and exotic instrumentation. Grails carry echoes of the classic bands of many genres, but they combine those various styles onto a single record, under one umbrella of musical freedom. They are the renowned stylistic globetrotters of a fanatical underground record collecting scene, able to hybridize their disparate musical heritage (from The Ventures to 'Tibetan Crime-Jazz') with grace and confidence to build new languages out of genres that were never intended to work together. When Grails dropped their fifth studio album, Deep Politics in 2011, it was instantly hailed as a cult classic and became the moment when Grails truly cultivated a sound all their own. And with Chalice Hymnal, they advance that sound with their most lush, expansive album of their inspired career. The perennial influences of mid-20th century film scores, obscure library music, and psychedelic krautrock are indelibly imprinted, but Chalice Hymnal exudes an eerie patience in unfurling the many layers of its subtle details. No one else sounds like Grails, and on Chalice Hymnal they sound more like themselves than ever before.