The quietly prolific Grails have been putting out an album or more a year ever since their first in 2003. Though they are constantly folding new elements into their sound, each record is an enigmatic dispatch from the same basic world. These dudes hail from grey Portland, but they have somehow perfected the art of desert-rock mystery, and if you are currently planning your spiritual pilgrimage to New Mexico, be sure to pack this album along with some of your finest entheogens (the iboga plant, perhaps, or yage) and a copy of Terence McKenna's The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens, and the I Ching. Trust me: you will enter the Rainbow Body before track three.
They haven't left the windswept desert of their minds, but over the last two years, Grails have gone from pleasantly trippy to permanently mind-altering. 2007's Burning Off Impurities was a relatively well-lit affair, and since then they've made a steady migration into ever-darker caverns. This year's Take Refuge in Clean Living was the first big step: alongside the usual artfully arranged head-rock, fuzzy bursts of white noise confounded your sense of distance while voices murmured low in the mix and bleeping Morse code floated in and out. Meanwhile, great whooshing atmospherics swept through the landscape like wind pounding a sand dune. On Doomsdayer's Holiday, the haze is even thicker, and the album represents a sort of endpoint to their journey: taking place in utter blackness, it is their most alluring and impenetrable trip yet.
It starts with the absolutely towering guitars. On the opening title track, they stagger about like B-movie monsters brought to life, and the song, with its slowly tolling riffs, resembles the sort of portentous intro track usually found on death metal albums. "Reincarnation Blues", which follows, features what is by far the most fearsome, monolithic stomp Grails have ever created. When the assault does let up, it is only to let a sawing, plaintive string instrument (likely either a kamancheh or an erhu) sing an otherworldly melody, and the alternation of relentless pounding with eerie interludes sharply evokes the queasy grip of a particularly nasty fever. When the song dissipates, midway through, into nothing but humming, ethereal voices, it inspires the same glassy-eyed wonder as Burial's "Archangel".
This is Grails' "heaviest" album, to be sure, with production assistance from people who've worked with Sunn O))), Faust, and others. But the heaviness doesn't just derive from distorted guitars: the entire album is overlaid with a vague sense of menace. When low voices begin a droning, wordless chant on "Predestination Blues", it feels like the awakening of something ancient and decidedly unfriendly. Even the moments of calm-- the feather-light strumming of "The Natural Man", for instance-- take place at such a distance, under such a swirling dust cloud of ambient noise, that they are disquieting. It is only on "Acid Rain", the album's closer, when the pall lifts, and it is the most dramatic moment on the album: by simply modulating to a major key and lightening their guitar tones, Grails switch on the lights all at once, and the effect is like emerging from a cave into blinding sunshine: equal parts disorienting and reassuring.
