GRIEF – Miserably Ever After 2XLP NEW AND UNPLAYED Throne Records Years in the making.First reissue ever since the original pressing back in 1996!Revamped artwork using the original sources.Grief's sophomore album after the genre-defining "Come to Grief"!A Sludgecore classic masterpiece!!! These crusty doom legends turned in a sledgehammer to the face with Miserably Ever After.Since way before it was cool to play slow music for fans of the hyper speed worlds of Death Metal, Grindcore, Powerviolence, and Crust, Grief have been pounding out slow, doomy, heavy brutality with screaming vocal stylings that borrow heavily from the early Grindcore roots of the early members.Laying out the groundwork early on for other early-'90s bands like Cavity, Iron Monkey, Floor, and Eyehategod, Grief had a challenge to live up to -- to attempt equal the strength of each previous album. Well, this album did that, and more.Grief can be credited with heavily impacting the doom scene as well as being inspired by it, with the influence of Black Sabbath and Los Angeles doom kings Saint Vitus more than apparent. And with a telltale Vitus cover ("Angry Man") and a bleak landscape of alienation, drug and alcohol abuse, misanthropy, and betrayal throughout every song, each chord is like a nuclear explosion of depression.Allmusic.com Listening to Grief’s Miserably Ever After, Years After I Stopped Feeling Miserable. I was waiting for the subway recently, and when it arrived I wasn’t sure if it was the local or the express. As I craned to read the sign on the side of the train car, I felt a two-handed push. I turned and half expected to see someone I know, playfully greeting me with a shove. But it was a stranger wearing big sunglasses. She looked at me with disgust—I guess I was in her way—but not as much disgust as the man with her, who gave me a death stare as he passed. The train was local; I got on a different car. Right then, I thought of the Boston band Grief, and their 1996 album Miserably Ever After, and my favorite song from it, “I Hate the Human Race.” This, I thought, is why people hate the human race. It’s not for enormous and unintelligible wrongs, like war or tobacco companies. It’s the small, unnecessary meannesses of the everyday. This is why you start a band like Grief. Not because you’re so depressed you can’t get out of bed. But because you keep getting out and this is the kind of shit you get in return. Grief are a cornerstone act in the Sludge Metal genre, which in case you’re not familiar, is essentially very heavy rock brought to a crawl, or traditional metal as performed by mean gorillas on downers. As such, Miserably Ever After is filled with anti-anthems. The guitar is exploratory and innovative, based in basic riffs but swollen and creeping, with feedback like an invasive species of plant overgrown across the melody. If you have a taste for the deep-throated vocals of metal, the singing is beefy and excellent. Overall, it’s not an amateur product. So why was this dismal, generally unappealing music what they chose to make with their evident skill set? That’s the key question for Sludge. Seems like a lot of engaging with a world you despise. I sense something suspicious, and it seems like Grief agrees. “Honestly, at that time I wasn’t all that miserable of a person,” says Jeff Hayward, the band’s singer and guitarist, in an interview in this month’s Decibel Magazine. “I was never a depressed or really miserable person. You know, when you’re young, you’re kinda angry about shit.” Guitarist Terry Savastano has a plainer answer about what was going on at the time: “Basically, the same thing that causes me to be miserable today. Just working, breaking my ass, just doing a shitty job for people that don’t care about you or your family, just thankless tasks. Just totally soul-destroying work.” So, life? Not to make light of someone feeling entirely out of place with their day-to-day, but it’s old news to feel bad about the myriad small injustices of existence. When I was 14, I had not yet begun my adult life full of routine and dull punishments, like the banal interaction on the subway. Instead, my young life felt near unbearable. I had colitis, which meant I was expelling a great deal of blood from my body daily and experiencing a lot of different types of mental and physical pain. To escape, music was my main gateway to other worlds. Sometimes this was transformative; in the case of a band like Grief, I wrapped myself in the cocoon of hatred they projected. I didn’t need too much of a push to begin to identify with Grief’s dark worldview, and I gave it a literal read. As a sick teenager, I didn’t have the perspective to know better about the small slights and the fleeting throbs of injustice they bring. Pain was my entire world, and “I Hate the Human Race” was something of a national anthem. The “I Hate” was most imperative, the “Human Race” something I perhaps skimmed over. The difference between then and now is that the feeling of hating everyone felt inward, less about others and more about me.Pitchfork.com
