Review
Greys
Brightly Our Stars Did Shine As The Sea Reached Into The Sky

After being slowly consumed by the subtle graces of In Fades (the debut cassette from this project), the longing for another recording from Greys similarly began as a slow ache until thinking about it became a weird tic (ask certain people that I will not name and they can corroborate my incessant pestering over the next Greys project); and then the heavens opened up and Brightly Our Stars Did Shine As The Sea Reached Into The Sky fell into my lap (OK, sorry for exaggerating… the record was in my email inbox), a full length album that truly shook me when I put it on for the first time.

First off, let me say that the music on this sucker is at times beautiful (“Beneath The Waves” still puts chills down my spine as does “Corroding, Blurring To The Shoreline”) while at other moments the sounds are jarringly disjointed while still maintaining a hypnotic edge (“And The Rain Falls Upwards” has this oscillating aspect that is weird but still keeps the numb feeling going); certainly, there can be no argument in that Greys shows a significant command of the apparatus to make the music here and an intriguing method to composition of this work. Still, nothing prepared me for the first instance of “the voice” (what could have considering my avid listening experiences with In Fades); “the voice” is a long narrative that runs throughout the tracks on Brightly Our Stars Did Shine As The Sea Reached Into The Sky and ties it all together in an impressive story arc. Still, “the voice” threw me for a loop; and the first time that I listened to the album, there was a lot of skipping ahead to listen and see if “the voice” was absent from any of the tracks because it was such a shock and my selfish side was initially repelled by “the voice”. Then, something very strange happened; this new Greys album began to slowly consume me in the same manner that the first had, and as Brightly Our Stars Did Shine As The Sea Reached Into The Sky seeped into my brain matter, I began to hold the record as close to the vest as the earlier one; the music is beautiful and haunting, and with each passing play of the album, I feel more and more drawn to listening to it on repeat while allowing the ambience to drag me away to other places.

Do not be put off by the idea that Brightly Our Stars Did Shine As The Sea Reached Into The Sky takes some time to really dig into the, quite literally, gently lapping waves with which the album comes at you; there are those albums (and this is definitely one of those albums) where the payoff is subtle and comes through giving said record the time to actually hear all the sounds that permeate the aural space. This effort from Greys is highly recommended for those that like their music a little more cerebral and subtle as opposed to the quick wank; Brightly Our Stars Did Shine As The Sea Reached Into The Sky is worth it for sure.