An “old-world” quality suffuses Grails’ new album Miracle Music, co-founder Emil Amos has said. It’s something that runs deeper than the Eastern Orthodox aesthetics that have often cloaked the Portland band’s records, or the influences from South Asian music and pulp zombie and Western soundtracks that give their music such a distinctive whiff of countercultural freakiness—it’s more akin to the sensation you feel in Tristan und Isolde when the wall of strings kicks in, or upon beholding a bruise-colored canvas by El Greco or Velázquez. Miracle Music is one of Grails’ most painterly records, but the swaths of color only occasionally cohere into an image.
This is the second album from the revamped Grails lineup featuring multi-instrumentalists Ilyas Ahmed, Jesse Bates, and AE Paterra alongside the core duo of Amos and Alex Hall. Coming less than two years after 2023’s Anches En Maat, it’s their fastest turnaround between albums since their early days, but while that record brimmed with ’70s funk-rarity grandeur, this one operates on a much lower register. The drums are reduced to a patient cymbal tap, only occasionally breaking into a groove. The dynamic interplay is subtle, with ambient soup yielding reluctant rhythms; the destination of these nine tracks is the point of departure for most other Grails songs.
The boldest new splashes on the canvas are the horn arrangements—courtesy of Kelly Pratt, who’s lent marching-band pomp to everyone from Beirut to Bob’s Burgers—and a malignant swirl of sampled choir that swoops through the margins like a ghost. The cleverest moments on the album come courtesy of these new toys, not least when “Silver Bells” peaks with a brass fanfare so pompous and triumphant you half expect Underdog to fly in and save the day, or when “Strange Paradise” fades into a doleful horn solo that’ll inspire nods of recognition in anyone who knows the name Dick Parry.
By no coincidence, those are the moments that push the music furthest toward filmic cheese. Calling instrumental rock “Morriconean” is a little like calling a movie Lynchian at this point, but film music runs deep in the band’s DNA. Paterra plays with kino-proggers Zombi, named in tribute to one of the great ’70s horror films, and Grails’ recent list of recommended records for Aquarium Drunkard is full of soundtracks to films you’ve probably never heard of. Miracle Music shines when it channels these influences, as on the high Western drama of “Harmonious Living,” whose tension and twang would’ve made a great theme from a primetime TV show in the quasi-Western backwash of Breaking Bad. But aimless tracks like “Primeval Lite I-III” and “Earthly Life” feel too much like watching a movie where you find yourself zoning out no matter how much you try to pay attention.
Grails have framed the album as an antidote to Spotify-era complacency, with Amos initially envisioning an album sleeve that resembled an old industrial record: “We thought the record was going to have that spirit,” he told Sun 13, “an attitude where you throw your body into the gears of society to try and stop the machine.” Grails are too skunky and weird to endear themselves to playlist gatekeepers, and that shows no signs of changing—but shouldn’t music with such an attitude grab you, rather than fading into the margins of consciousness like so much indica smoke?
