A trio from Wakefield, The Grand have very little in common with the city’s other recent musical export, The Cribs.
Whereas the brothers Jarman have made their anti-career through dissecting the minutiae of life taking place in a goldfish bowl, Messrs. Andy Jennings, Thomas Peel and Russ Smith write songs which they describe somewhat ambiguously as, “Transatlantic Pop”, in the process mining influences which have their roots well outside of the boundaries of West Yorkshire.
From the outset it’s clear that ‘Incapacitated, Ill Fated and In Love‘ isn’t going to die wandering; the band’s début album – on tracks like ‘I Don’t Want To Make You Happy‘, ‘I Want To Make You Cry‘ and ‘I Got It Wrong‘ – is locked in a place where every emotion seems to be turned up to 11, be it either desolation or pride. The sort of territory in which you might also find erstwhile miserablists like The National, the formula itself is simple enough – other than the occasional brass of ‘A City That Loves Me‘ – but while guitar/bass/drums in the wrong hands can be a proxy for the mundane, the threesome still manage to create a strident identity from humble components.
At its best this honest graft delivers some genuine thrills; the roller coaster ‘Come Over‘ a thinned out slab of post punk on which lead singer Jennings manages to sound out the chorus at just the right pitch, while ‘Eating Out Of His Hands‘ swells gradually over time, epic fringes clipped but still full of erudite sincerity.
As ever, the dividing line between passion and being over wrought is thin, and is one which, being critical, the band do tend to straddle from time to time. Opener ‘Romance Is Dead‘ finds the subject, “Screaming down the telephone line”, while Jennings’ often Marmite vocals are occasionally just trying that bit too hard. Maybe this is the inherent risk of there being no margin for error in a world where there is only the blackest of the black and vice versa, a situation in which ‘Why Don’t You Wait‘ winds up like a head first dive into the spaghetti and treacle of real life without much of a net.
Like many of its companions on ‘Incapacitated, Ill Fated, and In Love’ there’s a suspicion that in trying to make it come from the far horizons, The Grand have missed a trick. Whilst they’ve done more than enough here to get our attention, the more traditional Yorkshire qualities of understatement and perspective may have supplied some necessary grounding.
They may be an outfit to watch, but they’re still not as yet one to lose your heart to.
