Grady

Calling All My Demons

Audio and visual experiences being opposite inputs, this CD/DVD combo looks like Texas – the longhorn skull riding between Nina Singh’s bass drums – but in bullying Winnipeg instead, it sounds like Hell. As in black-hatted Canadian transplant Grady Johnson unleashing his slide guitar as if he were the Hell’s Angels. Texiconic out front of big red Tex-Mex skull tapestry, the local trio burns rubber through an oil slick of nasty postapocalyptic blues, and whether bassist Big Ben Richardson lays in underground cables of low-tone connectivity on the DVD or Johnson’s 100 miles of unpaved vox scuff the CD (“Good as Dead”), Calling All My Demons summons diesel-burning carnality whatever the format. “Blackass Woman” leaves little to the imagination on CD, but Singh singing a “A Cup of Cold Poison” demands eyeballs. Johnson’s two-headed guitar hints of Jimmy Page and his “Tom Sawyer” breakdown in “One Night of Sin” call for both discs. Grady’s gift: a black eye and cauliflower ear.

***.5

This article appears in February 25 • 2011.

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San Francisco native Raoul Hernandez crossed the border into Texas on July 2, 1992, and began writing about music for the Chronicle that fall, debuting with an album review of Keith Richards’ Main Offender. By virtue of local show previews – first “Recommendeds,” now calendar picks – his writing’s appeared in almost every issue since 1993.