My Depression is Always Trying To Kill Me

By Jake Tully

With an EP entitled My Depression is Always Trying To Kill Me, one might think Venice beach busker-cum recording artist Vince Grant was being entirely transparent.

However, the beauty in Grant’s music lies within a way of inhabiting Tim Buckley or Skip Spence, and in these elegiac and elegiac epic tragedies Grant makes some sense of simply spitting out it.

Grant is openly apologetic about his tenured past – dealing with the drink, drugs and the struggle of living with an insufferable amount of depression – a return not often found when so many artists couch owning up for concessions. Grant reminds one of someone who truly got into singing and songwriting, for self-betterment and to actually, literally say something.

Grant also brings to the forefront an interpretation of the long lost art of the 9-minute melancholia jam. Not only appropriate for the context of Grant’s healing process, it’s more involved than a tight 3:30 waxing poetic on feeling blue. This also brings Grant’s 5 track EP to something more of an album length endeavor.

The sound on My Depression is distinctly Chicago meets Pacific Northwest, twisting a coastal production around a core of alt-blues. Though, Perhaps on tracks such as Oceans II, Grant is truly going for a sound closer to something of trouble getting kicked up and then tamped down, a swirling cacophony of rhythm and untamed guitar that gets diffused a moment prior to the clock striking.

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