Album Review: Good Grief - Shake Your Faith

Formed in Liverpool in 2012, indie rock trio Good Grief consist of guitarist/vocalist Will Fitzpatrick, bassist/vocalist Paul Abbott and drummer Matiss Dale. After releasing a handful of singles and touring both the UK and the US, the band took a hiatus in 2015 to concentrate on other areas of life. Unlike Fugazi, the hiatus was not indefinite though, and the band reformed in 2018 with unfinished business on their minds. 

Support slots were the initial impetus to carry on, playing with bands they love like Superchunk and Wussy reactivated the band's mojo.  New album Shake Your Faith came about after the band fully reformed and was due to be released in 2020 as the Pandemic hit - that old familiar tale. The good folks at Everything Sucks took up the option and now the album is finally seeing the light of day. Ryan Doyle Elward delved deep to see if it was worth the wait.  

                             📷: Andy Von Pip

First track ‘Metal Phase’ from Good Grief’s Shake Your Faith is a time capsule to the early and middle 2000s. In musical layman’s terms, it’s a combination of Blink 182 [Take Off Your Pants and Jacket] and Band of Horses [Everything All the Time], giving an almost homage to the former halfway through ‘Hatches’, honouring as well Travis Barker’s drumming in ‘Line by Line’.

Relating to the latter, the singing on this album from frontman Will Fitzpatrick, is at points nearly ethereal, suspended at the height of his vocal range. It’s an energetic, poppy-complex and there’s really not a lot like it out there right now. 

Sound-side, Shake Your Faith is jangly, clean registers layered over distortion, filling a gap for fans of Built to Spill, justified by ‘Dimension Jump’. On songs like ‘The Pony Remark,’ Good Grief delivers what people have wanted from Weezer in these last years but were never given. 

As far as sentimentality is concerned, this record grants access again to emotional enclaves so often relegated to those spaces which have been left alone since teenage years or before. But this is a happy reunion and it “entitles me to that euphoria of youth” so we’ll say. How Death Cab for Cutie’s ‘Sound of Settling’ plays like a drive out of town before Friday night’s adventures and reads like a novel, ruminating, bittersweet.

 Shake Your Faith taps into an aura from a period ex tempore in what becomes very welcomed trip to the past. Showing that, decades down the road - it is good grief after all, not bad.

                                      r.d.e

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As always, to help support the artist more, we recommend you buy from Bandcamp.