Grayceon’s Jackie Perez Gratz auditions for the new Whitesnake video.

I’d be super curious to see Grayceon live; as Cosmo Lee points out at Invisible Oranges, since the trio consists of a cellist/vocalist (Jackie Perez Gratz, who’s also a member of Giant Squid, and played on Agalloch’s Marrow of the Spirit), a guitarist, and a drummer (Max Doyle and Zack Farwell, respectively), so “Two-thirds of the band performs sitting down.” That might make for a low energy show when compared to the live act of most metal bands, who thrive on getting physical, physical on stage.

But if any band can pull it off, it’s probably Grayceon. Their new album, All We Destroy, was our own Satan Rosenbloom’s pick for 2011′s edition of “Albums That Will Fuck Your Face Off,” and that dude has good taste.

Now you can preview the album for yourself: the aforementioned Invisible Oranges is streaming the track “A Road Less Traveled.”

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Grayceon
All We Destroy
Label – Profound Lore
Release Date – March 1, 2011

To quote a Coalesce album title, there is nothing new under the sun. Wait, shit – that was actually a passage from Ecclesiastes. See what I mean? Forty-odd years since metal’s birth, it’s tough to innovate beyond folding in a genre or influence that you wouldn’t think would work in metal. While I don’t believe that “originality” always trumps craftsmanship and verve in importance, I do miss the early days of my metal listenership, when everything sounded new to my virgin ears (as opposed to my current whore ears).

That’s why I was so stoked to have my face first fucked off by San Francisco’s Grayceon, around the time their self-titled debut came out on Vendlus a few years back. Here was a band that was unique through and through. You don’t find many metal bands with a female lead singer that refuses to play the siren role in some dork’s maiden-rescuing fantasy LARP. You’ll find even fewer bands with a cello as a lead instrument, and even fewer than that which utilize finger-picked electric guitar. Grayceon feature all three. More important than those eyebrow-raising bullet points, Grayceon make a wholly new music, one that grafts medieval cadences and the pastoral textures of early British prog onto a bedrock of supremely headbangable, ornate riffing. And there are no seams. Grayceon make metal, yes (and amazingly heavy metal at that), but they draw equally on …And Justice for All as they do Guillaume de Machaut.

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