For the past five Halloweens, Toronto has played host to Death to T.O., a marathon two-level party where 20-odd local bands dress up as some iconic group and cover a bunch of their songs in rotating 20-minute mini-sets. Last October, noise-punk quartet Greys performed as Smashing Pumpkins, a ruse that required not just an aesthetic suspension of belief (no dollar-store blond wig can make hulking bassist Colin Gillespie look like D'Arcy) but an ideological one as well. Essentially, the Pumpkins are Greys' polar opposites. Where Billy Corgan channels themes of alienation into unabashedly earnest, immaculately rendered grunge-prog, Greys power through theirs with bull-in-a-china-shop recklessness and snarky humor. And the messianic cult of personality and gothic flamboyance that Corgan so eagerly cultivates is antithetical to Greys' everyman, stage-leveling ethos. After all, Greys are the sort of band that write songs in honour of Fugazi's Guy Picciotto, while cheekily acknowledging that idolizing an anti-rock star like Picciotto is idolatry nonetheless ("You do what you do/ I do it, too!").
But listen to Greys' second full-length, Outer Heaven, and that Pumpkins gambit seems less like a one-off goof than a practice drill for the new album's fearless embrace of both art-rock experimentalism and pop accessibility. When they first emerged in 2011, Greys came off like a less brawny, more bratty complement to fellow Toronto-scene stalwarts Metz. Singer-guitarist Shehzaad Jiwani didn't necessarily shy away from melodic choruses and introspective lyricism, but he had to blow out his vocal cords to be heard amid the band's Jehu-schooled, post-hardcore pummel. And the feelings of inadequacy he was trying to express were filtered through cheeky song titles (see: "Use Your Delusion") and tongue-in-cheek complaints ("Wish I was born in New York, wish I was born in L.A., wish I was born in the royal family"). But with the tranquil, starlit jangle of the opening "Cruelty," Outer Heaven marks a clean, abrupt break from that past—not just by opening up greater spatial possibilities in the band's sound world, but by foregrounding a nakedly emotional tenor that permeates even the more typically ferocious tracks that follow.
Like many ’90s kids, Greys got swept up in the alt-rock revolution, before burrowing deeper underground to discover the self-sustaining network of bands and labels that laid the groundwork for it. (That evolution can be traced from the fact the aforementioned song about Picciotto swipes its opening line from the Foo Fighters: "There goes my hero!/ He lives right down the street!") Now that "indie" has become a satellite-radio format for well-heeled commuters, it's hard to remember a time when such a discovery could be so empowering that it could alter the course of one's life. But guitar-driven indie rock's deliberately modest scale and often introverted, sometimes ironic sensibility can make it ill-equipped to address the more complex socio-political conversations that dominate our thoughts today; at a time when the top pop stars of our age are tackling big issues head on, the insular nature of indie rock can seem antiquated at best and tone-deaf at worst. For those raised to believe in indie-rock's insurrectionary spirit, it's easy to feel like you were sold a false bill of goods—a music that once seemed absolutely revolutionary now reeks of complacency and privilege.
Jiwani is a unique position to reconcile this divide. He's of South Asian descent, which makes him a minority amid a scene that's predominantly white even in a city as famously multicultural as Toronto. So you could say his relationship with indie rock is complicated, and that tension comes to a head on Outer Heaven's delirious mid-album highlight, "Complaint Rock." Jiwani gamely assumes the role of a slack motherfucker ("gimme gimme my gold star/ for not trying so hard"), before summing up his chosen vocation with a two-faced cry of "I hate it!/ I want it!/ I need it! /I love it!" That conflict is as much musical as lyrical: partway through, the song's glass-smashing abandon gives way to a gentle waves of rippling, psychedelic guitars—as if Jiwani suddenly slipped into a spa isolation-tank treatment mid-song—before it's violently thrust back into attack mode for a final blitz. And that push-pull structure presents a perfect microcosm of Greys' larger mission—as easy as it is to complain about the state of indie rock and check out of the conversation, they feel compelled to stay in the game to get the job done right.
On Outer Heaven, that means redirecting indie rock's capacity for introspection and turning its gaze outward. In the past, Jiwani has expressed feelings of otherness in more generally misanthropic terms ("wish I could be somebody else and just go," he declared back on "Use Your Delusion"), but Outer Heaven's searing, slow-boiling salvo "No Star" sees him tackling matters of race in more explicit terms: "Don't shoot/ I'm not the enemy," he sings, giving voice to anxieties in the wake of last fall's Paris attacks and the subsequent bloodlusty calls for swift vengeance. And when you consider that he routinely gets the third-degree treatment from airport security, the harsh opening line of the industrialized stomper "Sorcerer"—"My body makes me sick/ I'm trapped inside my skin"—assumes an even more brutal resonance. But the songs here also touch on more universal, but often documented, situations: "Blown Out" chronicles the effects of depression on a romantic relationship, the song's thundering thrust and surging choruses mirroring the inner turmoil of someone who's "having a hard time when everything's fine."
Outer Heaven's heightened ambitions are best measured in terms of density rather than sprawl: the most bracing songs here pack in more radiant guitar textures, a greater lyrical depth, and sharper hooks without sacrificing Greys' innate moshability and punk-schooled economy. Ironically, the more self-consciously outré material feels staid by comparison: the sudden grindcore shocks of "Strange World" can't quite force the song to shake off its dirgey gait, and though the drum machine-ticked "My Life As a Cloud" taps into the spectral beauty of Halcyon Digest-era Deerhunter, its trickling guitar outro closes this highly charged album on an oddly resigned note. But even if Greys are still learning how to stretch out with purpose, Outer Heaven serves as a most welcome reminder of indie rock's iconoclastic potential, from a band committed to the belief that it could be your life.
