If Anything, the first full-length by Toronto noisemakers Greys, is the young quartets own warped version of a pop record; fast-and-loud punk rock and walls of discordant noise, held together at the seams by an acute sense of melody. "It's a record built around songs," singer/guitarist Shehzaad Jiwani states flatly. "Each song exists in its own space and represents different aspects of the things we like about noisy, dissonant music, but instead of being built solely around riffs, they were built with hooks in mind, too."
The 35-minute LP still plenty rough around the edges, as drummer and bassist Braeden Craig and Colin Gillespie, respectively, pummel the listener with syncopated rhythms played at break-neck speeds, while Jiwani and guitarist Cam Graham's serrated guitars go directly for the throat. Though there may be more melodies strewn about his exasperated shouts, Jiwani's lyrics express insurmountable frustrations from within. "The lyrics went from outward frustration to inward," the frontman explains. "Anything that made me mad on the outside seemed to be a reflection of something I didn't like about myself, so I ran with that. A lot of it takes place from within my own head."
Written over the summer of 2013 and recorded in ten days at Toronto's blossoming Candle Recording studio, If Anything, is a short, fulfilling listen. It satisfies the primal urges one derives from a punk record, but rewards repeated listens with subtle, shoegaze-y layers of guitar and self-consciously buried harmonies. "It's like an essay, where it illustrates a point but extends it further for the reader to run with on their own," Jiwani concludes. That extension is what separates Greys from other bands of their ilk; they respect and adhere to the foundations of noise rock while willfully blurring and challenging its boundaries.
