	There are certain stories that men save for years, rolling about the clutter in the back their minds only to fish them out casually at the crack of some damp and forsaken winter dawn, while jerking the final drops of Old Crow from the bottom of their bottle. 
We’d been talking and drinking all night in a ramshackle plywood structure, where sleep deprivation, exposure to the elements, and good cheap bourbon had interwoven into a hazy veil of something suspiciously similar to madness, from which Brennan’s voice emerged. “You know, you’ve never heard the real story of how this band came into being, of the night Clyde met the Devil.” As he paused for effect I fished around for an incense stick and lit it with a nearby blowtorch; I’m generally not religious, but didn’t want to take my chances, not in a place like this and certainly not on a night such as this.
	“We were setting up for a show, and Clyde had wandered off in search of rolling papers. I don’t know what went down between him and whomever he met that night, but he reappeared half an hour later, a changed man.” Another pause, this one longer than the first. 
	“That’s it? That’s the story?” I felt let down, I had allowed myself to get all creeped out over nothing. “You just say that because you didn’t see his face.” The voice from beyond the haze was low and confident. “Now you and I both know Mr. Clyde Hunter is by default an ungodly-looking SOB, but this was as if someone had popped Marty Feldman’s eyeballs into the skull of a Rottweiler. And he changed, man, you never knew the old Clyde. Sure, he’s still a twisted, drunken vagrant whenever he can afford to be, but used to be a total loose cannon, a head case. There were no real Hangover Bandits prior to that night, you understand? Just a ragtag collection of musicians in suits, mindlessly (albeit effortlessly) belting out jam after jam, because that’s the way Clyde liked it. Then out of the blue he’s hell bent on this album, recruiting, hand-picking and choosing musicians for each track.”
	Grey Skies. I had yet to listen to all eleven tracks, as the old portable CD player, original batteries rusted into place, had finally kicked the bucket, taking out our shelters only power line with it. After the pyrotechnical shower of sparks left us both in silence and the dark, the drinking had begun, and incense employed to overpower the unpalatable odor of ozone. The half-dozen tracks I had heard had taken me completely by surprise; I’ve lived in Los Angeles long enough to be well familiar, saturated almost, by the “Hey man, check out my band” phenomenon, and the inevitable follow-up of “Cool, right man? You should buy a CD, show some support, man.” The streets of this wretched city are constantly crawling with shady characters that could only be found in the most grueling, creepily horrific novels that one wouldn’t dare read alone in the dark. And the musicians are by no means any dissimilar. ‘Grey Skies’, however is by all definitions, an opus. Each song is attentively orchestrated, each track engineered to flow smoothly into the next, giving the whole project a heartbeat-like quality which left me eager to hear more (but seriously, where do you steal a CD player at five in the morning?). 



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