Boston-based Fat Creeps have been releasing blistering basement tunes for more than four years now. Along with being half of Fat Creeps’ songwriting duo, Gracie Jackson is an astonishing songwriter and guitarist who has taken time to foster a second project simply titled, Gracie. In addition to Jackson herself, Gracie includes Kal Marks bassist Mike Geacone, and leans in a distinctly different direction than Fat Creeps. Where FC distorted their way through harmonies and built beautiful, but fast-moving walls of sound, Gracie is more minimal.
At the moment, there are only three tracks up on Gracie’s Bandcamp: “Jesse”, “Nothing”, and “Crustaceans”, each released independent of one another during a 10-day span in late October. The first of these songs, “Jesse”, is driven by Jackson’s gravelly Cat Power-esque vocal register, a defining feature as well as the focal point that much of Gracie’s instrumentation revolves around. On “Nothing”, the same holds true, although this time the slow build leads to a much higher crescendo that allows for the quartet to show off; there is a section of “Nothing” that sounds like a straight Kal Marks/Fat Creeps hybrid, which makes sense considering the members. A thundering bass tone coupled with solid drumming and carefully crafted guitar wails formulate the loudest and bravest section out of all three, and is blissful to witness when performed live: the slowly burning fuse finally reaching the explosive.
The catchiest of the three tracks is the final one: “Crustaceans”, a true bummerjam that is essential to understanding the possibilities of Gracie. The song is all up-tempo strums and rolls, spinning about from recognizable form to recognizable form without ever settling on something comfortable. The whole constructed form falls away as the song melts into an outro that exists seemingly to prove that playing loud isn’t the only way to completely rock. The lullaby jam at the end of “Crustaceans” anchors these three songs as a set and separates Gracie from other ostensibly similar sounding bands. The dynamics exhibited throughout the songs potentially serve as a hallmark of things to come—hopefully more songs.
