Noise, art, experimental music band Gray, founded by Jean-Michel Basquiat in 1979, has released their 2nd album titled, “Last of the Beats,” a reference to the lyrical poetry featured on the album, inspired by the likes of Allen Ginsburg and William S. Burroughs (Grayʼs first album was “Shades Of…,” released in 2010, a true collectorʼs item today). Original Gray members Nick Taylor and Michael Holman conceived of this sonic and verbal work of conceptual and intellectual beauty, knowing they would be collaborating with a variety of celebrated musicians and lyricists, including: James Lavelle of U.N.K.L.E. (and MoʼWax Records); writer and Downtown New York editor Glenn O’Brien of GQ and Interview magazines; Spike Lee actor and spoken word artist Roger Guenveur Smith; music producer and Digable Planetsʼ DJ King Britt; John Cale Band and Andre 3000 drummer Deantoni Parks; legendary Hip Hop music producer Arthur Baker; “The Widow Basquiat” Suzanne Mallouk; 1970s New York scenester and poet Victoria Galves; with liner notes written by famed American art critic Carlo McCormick
Carlo McCormick Liner Notes:
These grooves are the product of stealth engineering, improvised like an assassination five years in the planning, a conspiracy of creativity meant to slip in the truth while savoring the fiction. Itʼs impossible to fathom just how hard it is to make something so easy, to instill endless complication within eloquent simplicity, to tear the whole damn thing down so that the jagged broken parts actually fit back together, but the slack laidback beauty of Gray is that they are not in any rush, like the slo-mo suspension of time in our hyperaware perceptions before sudden and inevitable impact, this is the sound of deceleration, an unwinding that takes your breath away.
To the last of the beats, hereʼs the last of the at last, the song of the swan to the unborn, the clinging desire of the last dance, the just deserts of a last meal, what adheres grasping and gasping at the edge of forgetting like the muscle memory of a dream. Track by track, Gray excavate the senses and sensibilities of forlorn fables, the heroic slipping off crumbling pedestals, a city of need revamped as a city of greed, the light flickering, overcome by shadows, places and times conjured like a sonic psychogeography of passing and absence.
Their music has traveled a very long way to reach our ears, rewritten, rerecorded, recollected, remastered and renegotiated over and again by two artists, in constant dialog, spaced out in deep focus, a four-legged split personality in dogged single pursuit to somehow get it right. You can hear that distance in these songs, the harmonics of process like a reverberant echo, the undertow of an undertone, the taste of ripening.
Only the truly young can hear the ghosts singing, but it takes an old kind of wisdom to make out their words. Thatʼs the post-modern contradiction of this band; where novelty sounds classic and stories unfold as allegories of metaphors, landing from far away with undiminished urgency. Two guys, Michael Holman and Nick Taylor, stubborn enough to forge their own musical tempest apart from the meddling, marketing and machinations of any music industry, yet slick enough to enlist an unimaginably brilliant cast of collaborators, Gray is the carefully curated composition of a community, the common sound of disparate voices, the mix of the melting pot, the noise of incompatible agreements. Pastiche and pluralism, itʼs a collage cut up and still bleeding, the angry graffiti on a wall of sound, the melodies that linger like a sweet aftertaste of lazy pleasures, the battle cry of the vanquished sounded in the survivorsʼ silence, the dance of the reckless to the tempo of an impending disaster, the tone of resistance in a note of rebellion, the voices of visionaries talking over, and under, the din of timeʼs cruel march, correspondences rich and textured in a lost chord yet to be fully decoded. The references are dizzying, disorienting and defiant to the reductions of genre, chaotic and unruly dissonance given rhyme and reason, blues with a beat, art with a purpose, lyrics that bruise, the sound of repercussion struck with a vengeance. This music is so stone cold cool itʼs hot to the touch;deep downtown and dirty like a lethal seduction, a collective memory that needs no introduction.
