With songs that are moody and oblique, The Grebes evoke clouded reflections and hard-to-reach feelings, bouquets of dead flowers discarded roadside and distant storms incoming from eternally grey skies. The Portland, Oregon band takes significant inspiration from a highly specific window of post-Byrds garage rock, but adds discordance to the sad-eyed jangle with notes of outsider weirdness and a restless disposition that pushes the performances. The Grebes’ self-titled, ten-song album is caught in a mysterious middle-ground between transcendence and anxiety, with edges as rough as loneliness and an eye always on the menacing stormfront. The band’s origins trace back to 2016, when guitarist/vocalist Bob Desaulniers and guitarist Raf Spielman would occasionally DJ downer garage and early psyche sides at a Portland bar. The idea came up to start a new band informed by these rare sounds, and Desaulniers and Spielman looked to the hyper-obscure bands they were playing at their DJ nights (The Bachs, The Dovers, The Contents Are, The Index), the beautifully bewildering sounds of the Mississippi Records comp Anxious Color, as well as more perennial favorites like Love and the Red Krayola for direct inspiration with this new project. A few songs were written and some ideas were sketched out, but the band didn’t start in earnest until about 2021 when bassist Dustin Scharlach came on board. When drummer Kyle Raquipiso joined in early 2025, he brought a distinct aggression to the sometimes subdued mix, giving the soft-focus psychedelia of the songwriting an edge indebted to the blunt force of Dead Moon or Dez-era Black Flag. The Grebes boils all of this down in a home laboratory, ending up with something stranger and even more uneasy than the sum of its parts. The translucent recording quality gives a dream-like feel to the entire album, whether the music surfaces as the moss-covered punk of tracks like “Yours” or depressive, lingering outreaching like “Circle,” a plaintive meditation on futility. Forever between upheaval and dissolution, acceptance and defeat, The Grebes exist in an unplaceable world of neithers. It’s a fascinating place that’s cold and uncertain, but still somehow always beautiful. - Fred Thomas The Grebes by The Grebes