It’s fairly oxymoronic* to refer to something as “mini-epic”, but then again, "Gray Worry” is this newly minted Nashville new age artist’s nom de plume, and their red-herring album title is, in fact “Trace Amounts”, so…all bets are off here.
Anyone not color-blind will attest that anxiety hardly holds a neutral hue. Anyone familiar with cosmic new age knows the songs are ambling and generally pretty fuckin’ long. GW takes it upon themself thusly to distill such far-reaching subject matter into a minimalized, distilled form, takes but three separate synthesizer layers (or less!) and plays with emotional timing and grandiosity in such a way…
Were budget not an issue, this tape really oughta've come with a mini-projector to watch washed-out projections of births & deaths of nebulae so we could try to connect the contrasting thoughts between cold, impossibly distant phenomena in the span of a sonically curated hot minute** as opposed to what might take a further few billion years in real time/life. Who the hell knows? This tape is disorienting and engaging if you want it to be, but not quite*** bedtime material, like Stars of the Lid. Maybe think of Gray Worry as their astral, semi-wayward nephew?
and/or
—Jacob An Kittenplan
*and downright fucking heresy to the pedantic purists, myself sometimes inclusive
**these songs are almost pop-punkish in length, relative to NA aesthetics
***second to last track’ll derail anyone’s dropping out who was not down for the count by this time
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