Records of the Week

(Grails on MySpace / Temporary Residence)

The magnanimous Portland collective is back and are just as woody and terrestrial as ever, with billowing green melodies and living breathing crescendos, but this time it’s not just war of the forest animals, it’s also joyous. On this bitter Christmas eve, we offer you a track from an album full of zest and pompousity, but the kind that’s refreshing and trance-inducing, not overwrought and unnecessarily complex. The arrangements are savage at times, but always intensely human. The fright that often accompanies the unorthodox players’ organics and blackened exterior doesn’t originate from a place of evil, but rather from a vacation from the good vs. evil categorization that plagues major keys vs. minor ones, like their open-ended title might suggest. The songs rock, but they don’t explode. They simmer with ferocity, but they don’t lose sight of the object at hand: reverence for the breaks from life we so often take for granted. Get away from it all on the nowlikephotographs podcast.