Grand Shores is a celebration of musical subtlety, a generous hybrid of old and new styles captured in understated tones, often verging on the ambient and instrumental.
While lulling listeners into a state of serenity, Gabriel Pelli (Onyx Club Boys, The Old Ceremony) and Will Ridenour (Diali Cissokho & Kaira Ba, Zegota) move nimbly across musical traditions. Blending Americana with West African folk, and with instrumentation ranging from fiddle to kora, Grand Shores fuses their original sound with a contemporary aesthetic that draws widely from folk and indie, jazz and punk.
A collaborative project out of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Grand Shores released their first album, Tradewinds, in 2020 on Robust Records. The album was recorded in a single-room, 100 year-old chapel located in rural North Carolina. Such a setting produces a warmth in the recordings that mirrors the feeling of seeing Grand Shores live. A Grand Shores performance stokes the fires of familiarity, inviting listeners to a private experience.
Every album raises the hope of capturing something authentic. With Tradewinds, Grand Shores succeeds, not only because, for example, you can hear the North Carolina frogs and insects in the background of “Wild Kingdom” or the interplay of two gifted musicians playing one fiddle as in "28th of January", but largely because the album maintains its closeness to the listener. It balances different kinds of intimacies, transitioning seamlessly from, for example, a track like “Jarabi,” that grabs you with its percussive intensity, to “Knew It Couldn’t Last,” a personal ballad about memory and loss. “With a chainsaw and a cigarette you built your house out of wood, on the mountain of crystals where those great pines once stood,” Pelli sings, evoking an image that owes its endearing quality to equal parts candor and precision. In such moments, “those great pines” merge with the woods encircling the chapel where the music was recorded.
The album maps out a space that begins to feel familiar. One might say that it is this feeling of familiarity, a close-knit regionalism, that is the hallmark of any folk music tradition. But in a collection of songs with an international scope, its instrumentation and repertoire inching towards the global, it is the surprise of closeness that makes Tradewinds a remarkably compelling album.
In addition to several originals, the album features covers of Ali Farka Touré and Townes van Zandt, as well as multiple new arrangements of traditional songs from around the globe. Each track showcases the duo’s distinct pairing of American and West African string instruments, most notably guitar and kora.
Throughout this eclectic journey, Grand Shores stays very much rooted to the space that they call home. But they demonstrate, in doing so, that the local enclaves of home contain much more room than we might think. Like the easterlies evoked by the album’s title, which forever blow from east to west, Grand Shores brings the world a little closer, one note at a time.
