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Album Details

• Artist: The Grates
• Album: Gravity Won't Get You High
• Label: Polydor
• Year of Release: 2006
• ME Rating:
• Reviewed by: dadair on 2006-07-18

Feisty femme fuelled rock twirls around, propelled by punchy guitars and rattling percussion, winking at the sound Be Your Own Pet, Blondie, Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Regina Spektor making the Australian trio, The Grates a swirling curveball in the game of music. All this follows the summery, operatically sung introduction track 'I Wont Survive', containing rumbling guitar snippets to provide contrast and a startling element. '19-20-20' is a potent display of the Karen-O ilk vocal stroll and a hurried accompaniment to make the track shudder with frivolity and mischievousness;

"My baby is soft, yeah he's shooting tigers, my baby he's such a fucking liar."
My baby, boo yeah, looking for a 19-20-20, 19-20-20.
My baby, oh yeah he's leaving town, my baby doesn't want me around."

The versatility in Patience Hodgson's voice allows the band to have a musing blues interlude by way of 'Rock Boys' that allows percussionist Alana Skyring to dominate proceedings with her drilling beats. The frolicking nature of this snappy indie/pop outfit is put in a nutshell in the punchy 'Science Is Golden', featuring a snappy chorus, roving guitars and precision percussion to make up their catch-all song that will help them draw in a wider radio-friendly element. The shake your ass number on this full bodied fourteen track exploration of a free spirit, has to be the folk frenzied with yearning breaks of 'Inside Outside'. The verbally hypnotic repetition of the title in a rugged Jemina Pearl manner would induce gleeful gyration from a Jimmy Carter statue. Already creating tremors in their home country, The Grates have managed to replicate on record, the buoyancy and eccentricity that comes out in their live shows through Patience's "lost in the moment" antics.

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