Flames, Doorways, Grass and Time – Grasslands

Mercurial, that’s the word! Well, that’s one word at least.

It seems that many words and descriptions come and go through the listeners, and indeed the reviewers, mind as Grasslands’ music slips through the brain.

The same thing happens if you try to pigeon-hole it, depending on which thread you pull at, different genres spill out of the musical mass. Tug at the underlying acoustic guitar work and you find folk textures, but as you pull they slowly reveal themselves to be cocooned in warped industrial grit.

Similarly harmless pop melodies are found to be swathed in angular edges and smooth synths warp out to spacey ambience or turn in on themselves to become intense and claustrophobic bundles of pent up energy.

I don’t know where you begin, I really don’t. The only guidelines I have from the main man himself is that he was aiming for “digitally corrupted folk music through a broken radio” I reckon that is a fair description.

But the result is a manic, genre-blurring collection of retro-futuristic songs, in that it sounds like what the 21st century might sound like in the imagination of an early eighties post-punker, one who had grown bored with blues-based, three chord guitar possibilities and had rewired some broken keyboards and bent them to their will. At this point I would normally resort to lazy journalism and throw in a few comparisons, such as…..errr, no…sorry, nothing. I guess Flames, Doorways, Grass and Time is just impervious to journalistic dissection. Still the man behind it can’t really complain, people who live in grass houses and all that….

So my advice to you is, just buy it, buy it today, after all there is no thyme like the present and it is always good to end on a couple of puns. - Dave Franklin