Grails
Acid Rain
(Temporary Residence DVD)

Portland quartet Grails are a fantastic American rock band that deserve more recognition. Remarkably, they've been improving with each album (six in the last six years), culminating with 2008's Doomsdayer's Holiday. So now is an auspicious time for Temporary Residence to issue a DVD that touches on many of the group's Himalayan-like high points.

Acid Rain contains six videos of songs from the band's last three albums, Doomsdayer's Holiday, Take Refuge in Clean Living, and Burning Off Impurities, as well as a 41-minute live set from 2007 at New York's Knitting Factory club, plus studio/live footage from Grails' earlier days. It's a solid introduction to an instrumental band that set their controls for the heart of the sun—and actually come close to touching said star.

The DVD's title track explicitly evokes Pink Floyd's luxuriant, midperiod stratospheric bliss. Like most of the other songs that receive the video treatment here, it emphasizes Grails' mellower, more contemplative side while foregrounding their reliance on Eastern modalities. The majestic, slowly levitating "Predestination Blues" and "Take Refuge" are sterling examples of the latter tendency.

The videos' imagery reveals fascination with religious/pagan icons (especially Buddhist) and rituals, skeletons and skulls, nature, outer space, industrial machinations, yogis, snake charmers, and architecture. "Take Refuge" bears the most seemingly random montages, with Jimi Hendrix and his fiery guitar juxtaposed with a tarantula, a nuclear bomb, and a woman poised to plunge a knife into her neck.

The Knitting Factory live footage starts with Grails' greatest song, "Reincarnation Blues," a radiant paean that seems to possess supernatural powers to inspire the dead to rise. It's monumental, surging psych rock that heads eastward, sans kitsch. "Silk Rd." spotlights Emil Amos as a drummer adept at funk, prog, and ritualistic modes, hitting with power and stealth. But the real star here is a 12-string acoustic tuned to emulate a perfect fusion of sitar and mandolin. It's this instrument, and Alex Hall's and Amos's prowess on it, that lends Grails their distinctive, exotic flavor—a Morricone/Shankar spaghetti-raga spice.

Acid Rain excellently summarizes Grails' latest, greatest phase and whets anticipation for the next one.