It's important for me to memorialize Vacation Vinny in some way as we near its 10-year anniversary. Released in 2014, it was the Grass is Green's last album, but it stands as one of the better examples of its era. Example of what you ask? It's hard to explain, but there was at one point a genuine counter-weight to the types of indie bands whose music was used in commercials and who received high marks from, now, bizarrely, dominant media publications (none of whom I will name here, because, frankly, I don't need to). The Boston band felt like they were, intentionally or not, a part of that thoroughly necessary corrective force- a weird, almost indescribable, confluence of post-punk, post-hardcore, and freaky hippy energy, that favored tons of feedback and a plug-in-n-play, casual garage rock ethos. The culmination of a hard underground approach and an ethereal blending of aesthetics that was sustained by fellow travelers like Krill, Gnarwhal, Two Inch Astronaut, and My Dad, and which found a home on the ever-exploratory Exploding in Sound. I listened to Vacation Vinny a lot when it first came out, not really realizing that the era that it came out of was either significant (at least to me), or that it might turn over at some point and dissipate. All I knew at the time was that I preferred what Grass Is Green was doing to anything that the "people in the know" were telling me I should be listening to. All the weird phases that opener "Sammy So-Sick" ripples through still astonish me- building up steam with a little Mid-West jangle and cooling down with a drift of mellow surf-psyche before steadily lashing out in increasingly soggy, murky, and discordant fits of intense relapse and nervous convalescence. "Disjoint" tags in as the follow-up, and wastes no time hurdling itself down the short corridor of the tracks run time like a man attempting to escape a straightjacket by propelling himself through the neck as if he were a gasping fish leaping through a porthole and back to the sea. Later "Scattering Ram" wriggles and protests as if it's avoiding an uncomfortable subject (like alimony payments or its parent's divorce) only to covertly counter with its own forceful rebuttals and accusations, in a hot flow of feedback and evasive but cogent grooves that resemble Pavement peeling out in the spirit of Drive Like Jehu. That heated exchange is then followed by the one-legged loping of "Spore," which proceeds through a series of languid swells and small bursts, with purposefully placed guitars and percussive splashes dispursing as if they were mushroom glands erupting in slow motion, staining the air with plumbs of sticky fragrances, deciduous hues, and earthy blots. There are still plenty of bands doing creative and exciting work, but few could qualify as being as willfully or colorfully obtuse as Grass is Green. Even after all these years, Vacation Vinny is a welcome escape from the ordinary.
