Cuddle Up With: Grand Hallway

Cuddle Up With: Grand Hallway

Seattle's Capitol Hill Block Party concluded last night, and while I was only able to attend the final day, I got to see some fantastic performances. Main Stage performances by Battles, Cave Singers, and Explosions in the Sky were excellent, but it was Grand Hallway's performance on the smaller Vera Project stage that wowed me the most.

Grand Hallway's sound is gentle and lilting, blending whispery fingerpicking, haunting harmonies, and the occasional melancholy pump-organ. It is the music of sleepy dreamworlds. The sonic lightness of their 2011 album Winter Creatures is juxtaposed by lyrical heaviness: motifs of familial ties, memory and mortality create an almost spectral quality, like a soul caught between the worlds of the living and of the dead. It's an album that is quiet but vast, expansive not in a showy look-what-I-can-do way, but in a way that is humble and brings the listener to a place that feels safe and warm and comfortable, almost like home.

Grand Hallway - Apple Tree


Grand Hallway - Little Sister


Check out the video for Grand Hallway's "Roscoe (What A Gift)" below. It was filmed in the Neptune Theater, where frontman Tomo Nakayama worked for a decade, before it was transformed from a movie theater into a live music venue. It's stunning.

Grand Hallway is playing The Crocodile in Seattle with Wye Oak and Say Hi on Tuesday, August 9. Buy tickets here.

Website: GrandHallway.com
Facebook: Grand Hallway
Twitter: @GrandHallway

Purchase Winter Creatures here.