All That Matters is Grackle Makes Good Music
The genre-defying band's third album finds Grackle hitting its stride.
Thank you for spending part of your day with Michael’s Record Collection! Those who have been following my ramblings about music for a while may remember that I have discussed the music of Steve Katsikas before. In December of 2019, when this thing was more blog than newsletter, I did a preliminary review of Steve’s solo album, Hidden Village. (You can find those first impressions at the link embedded in the previous sentence or at MichaelsRecordCollection.com.)
A year later, in December of 2020, I started MRC in earnest as a Substack newsletter, adding some of my previous music blogs (like the stream-of-consciousness review of Hidden Village) and backdating them to show more content to new potential subscribers. The first “proper” issue of MRC was a look back at the fantastic 2005 Wanderlust album by Little Atlas, a band out of Miami that Katsikas fronted and which is now on an indefinite hiatus.
I was living in South Florida at the time Wanderlust was released and was fortunate to attend some Little Atlas shows. I loved their originals and their Genesis and Pink Floyd covers. I thought of Katsikas and his wife, Joanna, as casual friends after repeatedly running into them at Little Atlas gigs and progressive rock festivals and very much enjoying their company.
Katsikas moved from Miami to Kentucky several years ago. He’s still heavily involved in music. His endeavors include fronting a band called Grackle, which released a new album back in November. I spoke with Steve and two of his bandmates about the album just days ago.
Let’s get to that story.
When Steve Katsikas sent me a couple of CDs back in 2019, I enjoyed both, but I spent far more time with his solo album Hidden Village. That probably kept me from diving into Grackle’s The Quiet Noise — the second album from the Louisville, Kentucky-based band — as much as I should have. I remember liking it, but with so much music and so little time, I have to admit that I neglected it more than I should have.
Nevertheless, I was excited to hear that a long-awaited follow up was in the works after seeing him post about it on Facebook. Being a busy guy, I made the mental note to check into it and then…I completely spaced out on it. The release of the album slipped past me, in large part because I find Facebook a nearly unusable mess these days and I don’t spend nearly as much time there as I once did. Surprised to see I’d missed the release, I quickly reached out to Steve to set up a time to talk about the new album.
Knowing my typical musical tastes, he warned me about the album in a direct message: “It isn't what I would call a "prog" album...maybe "prog adjacent" lol.”
When I listened, I felt he’d sold it short. I found Grackle’s third album, All That Matters — self-released in November of last year — to be a compelling collection of songs with plenty of progressive elements. What it might lack in longer compositions with crazy time signature changes and prolonged soloing, the album more than makes up for with tasteful, mature songs with interesting instrumentation and unexpected musical choices. This mix of indie rock, prog, alternative, folk, and classical is tinged with exotic sounds packaged in memorable hooks and tasteful playing.
Is it progressive rock? I’m not going to be a gatekeeper on that. There’s already too much of that on the internet. I think it checks enough of the boxes to qualify by today’s standards.
All That Matters consists of 12 tracks — 11 album tracks plus a bonus song — playing out over the course of an enjoyable hour of mostly original music, with a couple of interesting covers thrown in.
The band consists of:
Steve Katsikas (keyboards, lead vocals, guitars, saxophone, and hurdy gurdy)
Jeff Gard (drums and percussion)
Mike Lankford (bass)
Myra Kean (violin)
Travis Carlisle (cello and electric mandolin)
Jennifer Lauletta (backing vocals)
[Note: Guitarist Josh Parker joined the band recently but did not appear on All That Matters. Katsikas expressed his excitement that Grackle finally has a “legit monster” guitar player in the group and what it could mean for the band’s music moving forward.]
Of the current band, only Katsikas, Gard, and Kean appeared on the second Grackle album, The Quiet Noise (2019), while only Katsikas and Gard appeared on the 2016 debut album, Wintergarden.
Lauletta, one of the band’s newest members, provides luscious harmony vocals throughout the album, fleshing out the Grackle’s vocal footprint. She’s a newcomer to the progressive rock genre (whether this music fits in that bucket or not) and has been working with Katsikas on a Pink Floyd tribute for several years.
“Steve and I had a lot of time together in Dark Side of the Wall, and I knew how talented he was, but I didn't really understand his talent as a writer until I actually got that first listen to what was going on (in the Grackle demos),” she said. “You know, that was one of the things that really drew me to the music, was that it was so different from anything that I had ever done.”
Not beholden to a record company’s schedule, Grackle’s gaps between album releases allow the band to take its time and make the music public when it’s ready. They’re making the music that excites them, and enjoying the process of taking new compositions from the writing stage through recording and releasing it, playing live periodically.
“Having the autonomy and freedom to record and release at our own pace is like a gift,” Katsikas said. “We get to take our time, and that’s not a bad thing at all. Grackle is a musical adventure that’s really for us. We’re not really writing for an audience. We’re not performing for an audience. We’re performing and writing and recording and arranging and producing kind of what we want to be doing. It’s just a very comfortable and enjoyable, immersive project.”
It’s understandable if a band that has undergone such personnel changes over the course of three albums sounds a bit different from album to album. But it’s not just switching players that makes All That Matters the band’s best release to date. In addition to finding a personnel group that has gelled nicely together, Grackle has grown by leaps and bounds since a solid second release because Katsikas’ songwriting has evolved to fit the band’s style and the performers’ strengths.
Grackle’s music includes elements similar to many other bands but somehow puts those elements together in a way that defies direct comparison. Even the band members themselves struggle to put together a simple elevator pitch of what the band’s music is like.
“I have struggled since the beginning of Grackle to describe what the heck this is from a genre standpoint, from a musical standpoint,” Katsikas said. “I don’t think we’re a progressive rock band. I think we are, at best, a progressive rock-adjacent band. The struggle is real to describe what we are. I’ve got like 16 versions of our bio where I’m trying to describe what we do. None of them are right.”
The band’s latest album kicks off with “My Disaster,” which opens with an honest to goodness hurdy gurdy (how many bands do that?), played by Katsikas, who was gifted the instrument by the family of a late friend who had bought it and spent time with him learning to play it. The medieval-flavored sounds of the hurdy gurdy give way to Katsikas’ piano and a tasty bass riff from Lankford during the intro. The song gets heavier and more somber as it continues. To me, it feels like it has a bit of a Middle Eastern influence to it at times, which I think comes largely from the strings in the verses, with Kean’s violin stealing the show both during the chorus and in the quiet aftermath of it. Lankford adds tasteful bass.
I asked Katsikas about the Middle-Eastern flavor of the song and got a delightfully music nerdy response.
“The chord changes modulate in a particular way that implies a harmonic minor sort of scale, and that’s the Mediterranean-Middle Eastern sort of feel for it, because it’s almost going chromatically. So that’s sort of where that comes out of,” Katsikas said. “I think (Track 4) ‘Odesa’ does it a little bit that way too.”
“Oh Liana,” the longest song on the album at about seven minutes, begins with music like something one might find on a Loreena McKennitt album — very British folk — owing largely to the violin and Carlisle’s cello. It’s an interesting song that feels like it shouldn’t work, because the verses and pre-chorus sound like they’re from a completely different song than the chorus. When the chorus kicks in, the song kicks up in tempo and sounds happier and more lively.
The titular Liana was originally ‘Lilliana,’ but Katsikas changed it after some trial and error with the phrasing and how it fit (or didn’t fit) the music the way he wanted it to. The song includes a memorable guitar solo near the end.
Gard said the shuffling drum pattern for the haunting verses came from the music reminding him in some way of Gomez Addams walking through his great room in the old TV show The Addams Family.
“Disappear” is one of my favorite songs from a lyric standpoint on the album. I particularly like the extended chorus. there’s a lot of darkness in the verses, but it’s more hopeful in the chorus as the narrator pulls back from the edge with some hopefulness.
Like a king without a throne or a moth without a flame
Like a storm without a cutting breeze that drives the stinging rain
I almost had to disappear, I almost went away
But I held on to the lifeboat in the ocean of my pain
Like a watch without its hands, like an hourglass’s sands
That have scattered in the patient dirt, lost to time again
I almost had to disappear, I almost lost my light
But I found my own way back again when daylight turned to night
“This is probably the hardest song I’ve ever written from a lyrical standpoint in terms of how personal it is,” Katsikas said. “In 2022 I had a very serious health crisis, and I really recommend a health crisis for everybody who’s a stuck songwriter, because it just really opens the channels for songwriting (laughs). But in all seriousness, the song is about that in the broader sense — what it means to come face to face with… ‘Wow, this (life) is not forever.’”
“Odesa” is a beautiful and haunting song about the devastation the Ukrainian city has suffered at the hands of the Russian invasion as told through the eyes of someone who calls that city home.
“I just resonated with the suffering that I was reading about and hearing about,” Katsikas said about choosing to write about a city in Ukraine. “I steered clear in that song of the politics of it. I just really wanted to get at what it must be like living in a beautiful city that you’ve called home for generations, and I tried to imagine what would that be like for Louisville, where I live. What would that be like for South Florida? You live in the city and you take this beauty for granted, and all of a sudden it becomes threatened, along with the lives of everybody you love.”
The song ends hopefully in some future where the suffering and destruction has ended. Throughout the album, Grackle balances the darkness in songs with equal moments of light.
“I Can Make This Right” is a ballad with gorgeous, delicate piano throughout. The violin, delightfully present through most of the album — and present to some extent here — is pulled back a bit for this song, giving it more atmosphere and space. The last verse of this song gives the album its name.
I have found my sign, I have found my insight
I am swimming hard against the current
I am standing fast, I am slowing down
I am on the edge of all that matters
The songwriter said this was a bookend to his ‘health crisis songs’ on the album.
“When you have a health crisis and you’re thinking about what it means, you also imagine what it would be like to leave the folks that you love behind and what that would be like for them,” he said. “It’s really about the fact that our lives are defined by our connection to other people. I had time to think about that piece quite a bit as I was recovering.”
The balance between darker verse tones and the lighter chorus on “Sanctify You” is irresistible. As a songwriter, Katsikas is skilled at changing tones midstream, and that makes for a compelling listen in songs like this one.
“Heaven on Their Minds” is a clever cover of a song from Jesus Christ, Superstar, and it’s both an unexpected and inspired choice for inclusion. I have to admit I never rated the songs from the play, because they’re usually presented over dramatized for my taste. By making it a rock song, it’s transformed into something I can get behind. The strings give it a mini-orchestral sound, but Katsikas’ piano and the rhythm section of Gard and Lankford drive the song forward. It’s one of my favorite tracks on All That Matters.
Interestingly enough, no one I spoke with could remember whose idea it was to play it, but various members of Grackle have been involved in musical productions and have an appreciation for show tunes.
“I think that one just had a lot of power to it. It’s very rock oriented and is really cool,” Gard said.
“We kind of like the musical theater motifs,” Katsikas added. “It kind of fits with us a little bit. I like the way that modern musical theater can also throw off the tropes and the kinds of obvious things and move in different directions.”
The raucousness of the Andrew Lloyd Weber/Tim Rice song gives way to the sweet sadness of the mournful “Very Cold for June,” which is a brilliant title. The strings help provide the mournful atmosphere of the song, but it’s Katsikas’ vocal performance that is so forlorn as to make the song work. Lyrically, it deals with extreme isolation — in this case, someone all alone on Mars, when perhaps something has happened back on Earth, as communication with home has been lost. The strings help sell the mood, along with a deft touch from Gard on drums.
“That, I think, is my favorite,” Lauletta said. “It really touches me. I know that there’s a deeper meaning, but it really takes me into the plight of this person and how alone he or she is. And not just alone with themselves, but alone, as far as they know, in the whole universe. I mean, how much darker can alone get? It really touches me every time, and I loved singing it.”
One of the best things Grackle has committed to All That Matters is the dreamy bridge section of the otherwise quirky “The Pen and the Sword.” Driven forward by a keyboard riff and Gard’s staccato drumbeats. More Katsikas/Lauletta harmonies permeate both verse and chorus.
“Steve came up with the riff and it’s in seven, so you just try to get a drumbeat,” Gard said. “Just try to get that groove in there. It takes you right into the song and then you get into the chorus and it’s almost a heavy metal kind of feel to it. It’s not fun for Steve, because he’s singing (a part that’s) totally different than the actual riff (while playing the keyboard part). I don’t know how he does it. He’s kind of singing in four but he’s playing in seven, so that’s really difficult.”
“Choices” is a tough track to pin down. The drumming switches between rock and jazz styles. Some of the bass parts, the keyboards, and a pair of Katsikas sax solos are quite jazzy, while the strings at times sound like something pulled out of a mid-tempo bluegrass song (unintentionally, says Katsikas, and perhaps only in my own imagination). Given all that, it doesn’t seem like it should work, but it somehow does.
Katsikas said the song dates back further than anything else on the album.
“Spinning My Wheels” is cover of a song from California alternative rock outfit Dada’s 1998 self-titled album. It’s a great song with relatable lyrics. Perhaps the present is a better time for such lyrics than when they were written.
How did I get so pissed off?
So many people have it worse
Is it something in my past life?
Some kind of new age voodoo curse?
And I'd love to be happy
I forget how it feels
Driving towards somewhere
Instead of spinning my wheels
The Grackle-ized version of the song takes everything that was great about the original and somehow gives it a more complete sound. Katsikas picked that song to cover from his favorite Dada album.
“I’ve always loved that album, and that song has a legit string section on it,” he said. “So, I’m like, ‘OK, we can do that!’ We learned it, we play it live, and it comes out really good. I love Jen’s vocals on that track. She does a wonderful job of sort of inviting the listener into it.”
Not on the album proper, but an unlisted track that is available when purchasing All That Matters digitally is the bouncy “Clover,” one of the band’s most poppy songs to date. Katsikas and Lauletta harmonize well, there’s a keyboard solo through a harpsichord patch, which gives way to a Mellotron flute solo. The strings then kick in and elevate the entire thing and the song sticks in the brain long after it’s over.
Gard said he was one of the advocates to include the song on the album, but as fun as it is, it’s admittedly so stylistically different from the rest of All That Matters that it works better as a bonus or standalone track.
Fans of interesting and unusual rock music — perhaps Jethro Tull, Renaissance, or Kansas (or all three thrown into a blender) — would typically find plenty to like about Grackle and All That Matters. Grackle is a band with music that works best for those who enjoy a variety of genres as diverse as chamber music, classic progressive rock, modern European folk-rock (Mckennitt and the like), and zydeco-infused New Orleans jazz. The songs on All That Matters touch on all of those styles while remaining tethered to melodic pop/rock. The harmonies are sweet, the moods swing from somber to triumphant, and the players seem tightly locked together.
All That Matters is available digitally on the Grackle Bandcamp site, but you can pick up a physical CD at their live shows.
Tracklist:
My Disaster (6:40)
Oh Lianna (7:04)
Disappear (6:44)
Odesa (3:41)
I Can Make This Right (4:52)
Sanctify You (4:16)
Heaven on Their Minds (4:51)
Very Cold for June (5:27)
The Pen and the Sword (3:29)
Choices (4:50)
Spinning My Wheels (4:44)
Clover (3:29) — Bonus Track
Follow Grackle on their Facebook page and keep up with them on their official website.
For my full interview with Steve Katsikas, Jennifer Lauletta, and Jeff Gard, check out the video below or download/stream Episode 147 of the Michael’s Record Collection podcast. It was great learning about the band and Grackle’s excellent third release.
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