Last time we came across the French Psychedelica artist known as GR (name is actually Gregory Raimu) was with the re-release of the 2008 GR & Full-Blown Expansion album through World In Sound review by yours truly posted 03/01/2010). At the label's website, Mexican Summer is cited as being GR's third solo album, meaning we missed one somewhere.
That same info sheet also has a very apt and to-the-point description of the album, which I personally would not be able to write (I think), so I decided to copy that here (with the necessary adaptations needed to make the text comply to Concreteweb's review rulebook) : “It figures that you would need to go back 30 to 40 years in the history of Underground or Fringe Music to find any sort of precedent to the eight songs of A Reverse Age. Its restless nature highlights Raimo's frantic compositional structures and explosive playing across guitar, bass and drums alike, the product of one guy with real vision and the skills to pull off a work of virtuosic hostility such as this one. Things you know – Eldritch Forest Folk, Roadhouse Blues, aggressive Jazz-style drumming – are distended near to the point where they become part of GR's own musical syllabus, grounded by GR's street-corner vocal hustle, sounding like Armand Schaubroeck rapping into a CB radio in a stolen car, out joyriding and knocking off side-view mirrors... This is the music that truly does not let up until the record spins to a close, designed by and for travelers who subscribe to the higher mind, and know the promise that, properly tended, such an organ can reveal. This is the relity f the Psychedelic experience, folded up and fallen out of a dog-eared copy of TiKHAL, the truth that blots out the sun's myth-making ways and externally-damaging rays. Check this out now with pure intentions, and we'll see you a few months from now, unshaven and beaming like a God!”
High praise for commercial needs? Not at all, for GR indeed doés deliver the goods as advertised! 3 of the 8 tracks are instrumental and of varying length (in order of appearance on the album they're the 3:59 “Vapours Invisibe”, the 67-second “Spectre Of The Broken”, and the 7:11 “The Primitive Hoodoo”), and neither of the three is an album filler, each a strong entity on its own...something which can be said of each and every song on the 39-minute album, by the way. Regretfully, I have found no posting of any of the new album's material at either the label's website, or at (www.) myspace.com/bossyaya (GR's official MySpace). At the latter, you can already get an inkling of the man's genius from songs off his previous recording ventures, but I' afraid you will have to make due with the 30-second samples usually provided by your trusted online sales websites (Amazon, iTunes, CDBaby , etc...), if indeed they exist! Alternately, you'll have to leave the security of your home to ask for a listening session at your preferred local record store. Be sure to either bring your credit card or enough cash, because having gone all that way, you will wanna take home the album. That is a certitude as big as reality!
Great stuff this, and more than deserving to be added to my 2012 year-lists!