Album Notes

Gray Beast is the current musical expression of lifelong friends Lucas Spider and Boyd Reno. Lucas and Boyd met as young children in church where they enthusiastically performed Beatles songs a cappella before the congregation. Their first formal musical experience would come years later with the formation of Albuquerque indie rock band Oh, Ranger! Between '00-'03 they released three LPs as the flagship band for Socyermom Records, Albuquerque’s most notorious label. Oh, Ranger! quickly established themselves as a staple of the southwest music scene through extensive touring and often scandalous live performances. When Oh, Ranger! dissolved in 2003, Boyd moved to Seattle and continued work on his increasingly popular solo project Boyd Reno is John Center. Meanwhile, Lucas joined Your Name In Lights, a progressive rock band that went on to play dates with the Warped Tour and at SXSW. When Lucas left YNIL and moved to Seattle in 2005, it was a forgone conclusion that Lucas and Boyd would play together again, but what direction would they take?

In the Spring of 2006, Boyd approached Lucas with the idea of an album tentatively titled The Album That Killed Its Parents. The album was to be heavily electronic and melancholic. Boyd knew he could use Lucas’s expertise with keyboards and digital sounds and Lucas was eager to join up with his old friend again. The truth was, Boyd and Lucas both ended up getting more than they bargained for. The sound that developed was something more than electronic. It had hints of soul and eighties pop and frequent artistic references to modern R&B. Lucas and Boyd wrote and recorded the album together over the course of a year and a half. They kept The Album That Killed Its Parents as the title of their record and named the project Gray Beast, a reference to Lucas’s dream about “ambiguous, aggressive, and capitalistic beings of some organic nature.” When they were finished with the record they knew they had something different and very special.