GR – THE GR RECORD HEAD
Another white-hot wrecking ball through the sacred backwoods of the Blues, GR’s fifth solo album leaves scorch marks and splintered wood in its wake, scant regard once more for any known structure or style. As DIY as they come, underground hero Gregory Raimo again plays everything, committing the resulting racket to 40-minutes of ¼ inch reel-to-reel, his vocal treated to a sanity-questioning delay that chatters away just on the wrong side of comprehensibility – just how many people does he want us to kill?
We probably last met Raimo on last year’s similarly wild Hôpital De La Conception LP, the author of which officially remains a mystery, but other blog-based sleuths have convincingly joined the dots. Then as now in that case, Raimo remains pure freak-out, prowling over his blown-out Blues and frenetic solos in quite evil fashion. Recognisable fragments of rock ‘n’ roll history scramble into the cross-channel corruption, a perverted distortion of The Kinks’ “You Really Got Me” riff doing the damage in the Black Panther-lionising “Fred Hampton”, the warped slide of “My Returning Sound” conjuring forgotten rabble-rousers Immortal Lee County Killers before spiralling off into some psychedelically charged improv that unspools into an orchestral tune down.
This easy going on-ramp now a distant speck in the rear-view mirror, Raimo then flexes his muscle to deliver an ear-filling scree of static and close-mic’ed percussion, embryonic grooves trying to slither out of the primordial soup, the life literally strangled out of his protesting guitar neck as he gets intimate with every inch of his instrument. A glimpse inside Raimo’s kaleidoscopic brain, RECORD HEAD flicks though unsettling imagery and overlapping motifs, here a marauding exploration of bass scales, there, via “Mind Rotation”, an ever-intensifying proto-punk garage ripper. Don’t try standing directly in the way of this one, it’s just too unstoppable a force.
~THE GR RECORD HEAD is out now via the collaborative efforts of Cardinal Fuzz and Opaque Dynamo.~