The Banner – Greying
This is why end of the year lists suck, because albums like Greying by The Banner come out when everybody have made up their crappy charts.
Artists: The Banner This record is a perfect example of why I fucking hate end of year lists. The whole year you listen and listen, then you force yourself to put everything you loved in let’s say a top 10 and then it’s mid December and a bunch of bad people like The Banner (and their label Good Fight Music) come up with a release so good that can fuck up all your charts. And seriously who cares about the end-of-the-year clicks on your website when it’s all about rad music coming from everywhere, all the time.
Greying is a beast of a record. It’s nauseous and black. It’s extreme, aggressive and so fucked up even when the band puts the fast tempos and screaming vocals behind to indulge in calmer, yet equally depressive pieces or instrumentals.
From the first glimpse of the artwork you know you’re in for a harsh trip. And as they sing in Circle of Salt… ‘It never gets better’. The Banner have recorded a raw and uncontrolled outburst of hatred, despair and suffocation but called it music. Self-centered, self-destructive, but also a great reminder that we’re all slowly and steadily crawling towards to our very end. Greying comes in the perfect time of the year to piss on the holiday spirit, which we use to mask our compulsive and obsessive outbreaks of consumerism and the fact we’re nothing else but slaves to a sphere-shaped graveyard, going under the name of the “civilized planet Earth”.
And the lyrics here, fragmentary, offensive and ugly. Greying is not a an album, nor a statement, it’s a morbid grin of the whole human kind hanging on the gallows.
