New York City’s Grand Mal currently number, to the best of our available knowledge, Bill Whitton, Aaron Romanello, Chris Isom (who should be complimented on a good surname if nothing else), Parker Kindred and Nathan Brown amongst their ranks. Admittedly that could all have changed by the time you read this. Aside from mainstay, songwriting boss-man Bill Whitton, the rest of the band has been a swiftly revolving chain-saw conveyor belt of around 30-40 members since its inception in the mid-90s. Anytime we use the words ‘they’, ‘their’ – or descendants thereof – in this review, take only in the most unspecific respect. Likelihood is we’re referring to an entirely different band to you.
Their last album, ‘Maledictions’, arrived in ’99 wearing leather jackets, pouting, smoking, probably drinking too much and calling NY home, well before The Strokes’ blueprints even came up for consideration in an underground bunker somewhere. It was all over the place, but it was great more times than it wasn’t, a splattergun of 70s glam, 60s psychedelia and 90s pop, like The Dandy Warhols ramming a Moog up Marc Bolan’s arse, an exuberant album that was never anything other than good time rock ‘n’ roll. ‘They’ don’t sound quite like that anymore. But they are still rock ‘n’ roll. Old dog, new tricks, etc.
Gone is the electronic giddiness that drove the last album to some of its best moments and in, or at least remaining, is a classic sounding rock album. Dave Fridmann (Mogwai, Flaming Lips) is at the controls here, not that you’d ever tie him or his trademark expansive soundscapes to it. It simply has that typical classic sound, to go with the classic Stones/New York Dolls/T-Rex/Mot the Hoople swagger and the classic, Almost Famous, cliché-ridden, no-two-ways-about-it, below-out-loud raw rock songs. And to be honest it feels alright, shameless even.
Typical ‘Bad Timing’ lyric: “We’ll cut my ashes with cocaine / then dump ‘em out of an aeroplane” (‘Disaster Film’). Yeah! You can almost feel your hair growing, tattoos forming and your fist punching the air through no conscious decision of your own. He’ll no doubt carry on writing songs like the burning, anthemic ‘Get Lost’ and the seering ‘Stonesy singalong (“standing on the corner, smoking marijuana…”) ‘Duty Free’ for the rest of his life, you can almost stake your own life on that. Unless he stops drifting though you feel he’ll also continue to be just kinda great, always stopping the same distance short of fantastic.