Rating: NNNN
Brisbane’s Grates make pop, for sure, but a kind of gleefully refracted revisionist pop music that values boundless emotion over intellectualized fiddling, a mishmash of influences that, like hot pink and red, shouldn’t work in combination but dazzle when properly executed. Gravity Won’t Get You High is more than just a smoothed-over version of the gritty bubblegum-garage of their indie EP. It sounds like producer Brian Deck wisely let the good-natured three-piece go mad in the studio, allowing Patience Hodgson, John Patterson and Alana Skyring to layer bits of whatever they fancied onto their basic template, then pulled it together into a cohesive whole. The collision of distorted guitar with bluegrass banjo and fiddle on the pensive ballad Sukkafish is genius the piano-recital keys and circus waltz tempo that shatter into a snarly-guitar chorus make Nothing Sir soar. The trick here may be lead singer Hodgson’s willingness to completely take on the vocal persona required for each track she immerses herself in the precise character required for the various genres. This is superlative pure pop, a perfectly sequenced album where you happily remember each of the 14 songs long after the final track ends.
The Grates kangaroo-hop into Lee’s Palace Saturday (September 9).
