Grace Gale - A Few Easy Steps To Secure Heli-Camel Safety

I’m not sure if any self-respecting metal head would consider Denver based Grace Gale a real Heavy Metal Band or if they’re merely hard rock. But for those of us who are not too sure what the difference is between speed, doom, thrash, grind core or any other myriad cores out there in metal world, suffice it to say that Grace Gale is some sort of goofy metal-oid. Sadly, there isn’t a girl named Grace Gale fronting the band—if one woman were doing the vocals on this record, it would be pretty impressive. But alas, Grace Gale (seemingly, the name is a homophone for gray scale) has two dude vocalists: The nearly intelligible, pleading-voiced and almost emo-like guy and the “scary-monster” voiced guy. Yup, emo-guy sets ‘em up, and scary-monster guy knocks ‘em down. The two weave their incongruous vocal stylings over a metallic mush covered in typical old-school metal guitar tendrils. Unfortunately, however, the band wails and wails, but the songs never seem to go anywhere. There are no catchy hooks to base their songs around, and the album’s nearly bassless mix robs their crescendos of any power. Lyrically, A Few Easy Steps To Secure Heli-Camel Safety is equally sophomoric, with high-school-poetry lyrics like, “Switchblade romance/This is your last chance/Lines laid down/Soothing sounds/Speeding car ride/No wonder we died/Roses and gasoline…” But at least Grace Gale doesn’t take themselves too seriously. To prove it, they’ve shoved in a bunch of wacky little moments between and within their songs, like cheerleader-sounding backing vocals; fragments of girls saying vaguely naughty things; and, lamely, even a clip from that Ben Stiller movie, Dodgeball, “Nobody makes me bleed my own blood!” Grace Gale isn’t completely without its charms, and if you’re just out of high school you’d be well within your rights to love these guys, but for those of us not in that particular scene, A Few Easy Steps To Secure Heli-Camel Safety is insufferable. [www.blackoutrecords.com]