I am one lucky dude, getting all these cassette tapes sent to my front
door, and all I have to do is write a little something about them! How come all
you other suckers out there aren’t doing this? It’s like a bonanza! A bonanza,
I tell you! And sometimes, when the moon hits the water over the ocean just
right, I’m #blessed with the element of true, unadulterated surprise. I then
usually drown that surprise in celebration beers, and tonight is no different.
Tonight I’m getting my celebration beer on about an experimental tape by a couple of guys who don’t even care what you
think. Not even a little bit! Darin Gray, who pounds the electric bass, and
Bill Horist, who jams on that electric guitar, pretty much have the chops to do
whatever they want, and they really, really
do whatever they want! Whether
it’s shred like metal geniuses or plink and pluck like nightmare pointillist
poltergeists, Gray and Horist remain restless and active and in your face. Marginal is nine tracks of unwavering
forward momentum, not merely noise and so
not rock, an open blast furnace, ten strings of plugged-in dynamic thrust.
I’ve chugged like six beverages or so in the tape’s forty-one minutes, and I’m
feeling great about myself, great about life, and great about Darin Gray and
Bill Horist. And I even learned the most important lesson of the day: Darin
Gray plays in Nashville great William Tyler’s band! William Tyler is the shiz.
If he’s got guys like D-Gray on his roster, he’s a smart man. Doesn’t even
matter that something like Modern Country
sounds nothing like Marginal. They’ll
probably both make my year-end list anyway. Do people still do that? At least
I’m not assigning arbitrary scores out of ten. That would be embarrassing.
([Whispering drunkenly:] You guys would get a high score though, maybe not a
ten, but still a really good score!)
--Ryan Masteller
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