It may sound like a backhanded compliment, but it’s quite a skill to amount to more than the mere sum of your parts. Jordan Edward Benjamin, better known as Grandson, is a case in point. On Inertia, his third full length album, he exhibits a bunch of pretty rudimentary poppy-emo-meets-rap-metal ideas, displays some incredibly basic socio-political rhetoric in his lyrics and proves to be, even by rock music’s famously ropey standards, a very poor rapper... and yet, there’s enough innate songwriting nous and understanding of hooks and dynamics to make this enjoyable all the same.
Take second track Autonomous Delivery Robot as an example; a kind of pre-school System of a Down that’s not weird enough to stand out as uniquely as that band did, but it's a deliciously catchy, instantaneous, bug-eyed thrill all the same. Elsewhere Self Immolation does a nice job of melding Korn with Clutch, God is an Animal executes that “quiet-quiet-loud" boom and burst thing incredibly effectively and Bells of War has a Tom Morello-worthy riff.
It’s not all great, Little White Lies is a bit Biege Against the Machine and when the Flag-Shagger's Public Enemy Number One Bob Vylan turns up on Who’s the Enemy, he elevates it a touch but can’t save it from sounding like a Linkin Park B-side.
Ultimately, although you’ve probably heard this type of simplistic rap-rock a million times over, the reason you keep hearing it is that, get it right, and it is a deeply satisfying thrill. Luckily, in the main, Grandson manages to stay on the right side of this balance.
