Highly recommended. The three members of New York’s Grid can claim a pedigree that draws deeply from both jazz – the skronkier, freer end of the form – and noise, albeit noise broadly traceable to rock music. Their second album upholds both those poles with power-surge ferocity. Its opening five seconds, saxophonist Matt Nelson playing unaccompanied to launch "Brutal Kings", is more recognisably ‘jazz’ (as someone who nodded out in a 1970s Bowery loft and has just woken up might perceive it) than the entirety of Grid’s churning self-titled debut from 2017 was. The sixth second is where things start to get beastly, though. Tim Dahl deals in densely knotted, chisel-blunt basslines, within which you might detect the metallic prog tones of, say, King Crimson, but with any breathing room excised by design. Drummer Nick Podgurski has a captivating anti-swing style that seems almost inhuman at times – not in the sense of breathtaking BPMs or flawless virtuosity, but in how much of ‘Nythynge’ judders along with a glitch techno-like approach to rhythm. A whirlpool of long, mournful sax notes and omming low end is abetted, for much of this track’s 12 and a half minutes, by a snarling traffic jam of feedback you might imagine came from a guitar, maybe a student of the Keiji Haino or Dead C methods. In fact it’s all three members, their chops fed into some pedals of Nelson’s and reemerging as so much sausagey savagery.
