Grex — Electric Ghost Parade
Approximately seven years ago, my friend Mark invited me to a show at the soon to be shuttered Oakland cafe Mama Buzz that was organized by the guitarist Karl A.D. Evangelista. The opening acts played a bit too long and Evangelista was left with just 15 minutes before closing time for his duo set with drummer Marshall Trammell. But, years later, I still remember those 15 minutes of furious, improvisational squall—like if Sonny Sharrock and Rashied Ali had ever gotten together for a brief, glorious freakout. Over the next several years, I saw Evangelista play in a number of ensembles and context, often bringing that same virtuosic, noisy experimentalism.
Evangelista’s main gig in recent years has been the art rock duo Grex that he leads with keyboardist and vocalist Rei Scampavia. On their excellent new album, Electric Ghost Parade, Grex consciously evoke the massive psychedelic rock albums of the 1960s. With drummer Robert Lopez and a number of studio collaborators, Evangelista and Scampavia hit on a number of touchstones of the era: heavy, rolling drums; searing guitar riffs; spaced-out solos; occasionally surreal and apocalyptic lyrics; and album art that is reminiscent of classic album covers from MC5, Love, and The Stooges, among others. The album even ends with a song, “Old Dogs”, that includes animal noises (or possibly human imitations of animal noises) much like “Caroline No” on The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds and “Good Morning Good Morning” on The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. While Grex’s affection for these sort of albums is clear and they successfully evoke many of their elements, they approach this aesthetic from the opposite direction of the classic 1960s psych rock bands.
Most of the classic albums of the psychedelic era came as the result of the bands of the time expanding from their more conventional rock sound by experimenting with new kinds of instrumentation, song structures, and studio-created aural textures. This often came as the result of some combination of psychedelic drug use, improved studio technology, more freedom in the recording studio, and a greater awareness of other experimental forms of music. Grex, on the other hand, arrive at Electric Ghost Parade from the world of experimental music.
The two members of Grex met at Mills College, where Evangelista studied in the school’s famed, experimentally-inclined music program and Scampavia was also involved in the music scene. They come from the “art” side of “art rock”, with their background in jazz, experimental music, and modern composition leading the way, as evidenced on their excellent 2017 rendition of John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme. So while the bands that Grex emulates on Electric Ghost Parade generally arrived at their psychedelic rock formulation by expanding out from rock into experimental music, Grex comes from the other direction, creating rock songs that work to house their experimental tendencies. This is why the best songs on the album mostly step out of the 1960s Hendrix/Cream/Traffic heyday and into the more experimental reaches of psych rock, namely jazz rock (in the manner of the Mahavishnu Orchestra and The Tony Williams Lifetime) and prog (particularly reminiscent King Crimson and Deerhoof).
That being said, my favorite song on the album is “Martha”, which is perhaps the most overtly Hendrix-like song on the album. The song is an ode to the last ever passenger pigeon (Scampavia works as a conservation biologist). The song’s spare verses highlight Scampavia’s sweetly melodic vocals, with some “Little Wing”-style guitar filigrees in the background. It shifts between the verses and a descending chord progression that underlies a couple of particularly squiggly solos from Evangelista that almost sound like a bird’s anguished calls from somewhere beyond the living world. The song ends with a recording of actual birds.
Electric Ghost Parade is available now from Geomancy Records.
