The Grip Weeds
The Sound is In You
Rainbow Quartz
Released: 15 September 2003

While Rainbow Quartz are busy evangelising about star-spangled power pop, the rest of us are slowly cottoning onto the fact that, Hey! There's something in this. One of the label's brightest hopes are New Jersey's Grip Weeds, a paisley-psych outfit that merge the wide-eyed wonder of Big Star with the pre-LSD outlook of The Beatles. In their world it's endless summer days and the joy of first love, a familiar template nowadays thanks to Cosmic Rough Riders and The Thrills, but where The Grip Weeds differ is in looking forward from 1966 rather than back from 2003. Such is their grip on their reality that even when they lapse into an overt homage to The Who (check out the carpet-bombing drums and pre-metal dynamic of 'We're Not Getting Through') they sound like they've just picked up some tips in Carnaby Street. They could so easily have ended up as a novelty; instead they offer the shock of the new.
Cliff Roberts