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The Sunday Times
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November 4, 2001
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On
Record; Pop; Music
The Grip Weeds -- Summer of a Thousand Years : Rainbow Quartz RQTZ056
**
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Cotton Mather, New Jersey's Grip Weeds are in thrall to the past.
Their third album invokes vintage recordings by the Move or the Who,
pitched at the mythical moment where pure pop struggled with the onset
of rock, a self-styled “serious” music about to break the three-minute
barrier. This it embodies a host of contradictions; Kristin Pinell’s
guitar solos are both histrionic and utterly inspired; the cod sensitivity
of Future Move follows the knockout beat-pop of Is It Showing. Then,
suddenly, the slippery stomp of Changed dissolves into a sitar-infused
drone and the Grip Weeds are absolved. Life and Love’s tabla percussion
resonates in all the right regions; Pinell’s vocal on a cover of Pete
Townshend’s Melancholia is suitably... melancholic; and the title
track is the kind of slow-burning, snake-charming, psychedelic vamp
nobody writes anymore, and maybe never did.
-- Stewart Lee
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