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press

"BRIAN GRILLO, 44 - He's watched AIDS take the lives of a hundred friends--and almost his own. To cope, the openly gay punker took to the stage, banging on a 50-gallon oil drum and spitting out angry songs about the epidemic. A major label signed his band Extra Fancy in 1996--then dropped it eight weeks after releasing its debut disc. But Grillo is still rocking. His latest CD features a song called 'Sustiva.' It's about the antiviral drug that helped save his life."
-- Newsweek, May 7 2006

"The ex–Extra Fancy front man roars back with this long-awaited follow-up release. Grillo’s voice, guitar, and songwriting take center stage on a lean, intense, and (mostly) stripped-down session. The playing is direct, and the words are biting on songs like the angry “Democracy” or the ode “Sustiva.” Production goes from sleek to tinny, but those choices sound intentional—Grillo as vintage Dylan or Cash."
-- Unsigned On The Dotted Line, Mark Davis, The Advocate, November 9, 2004

"As the frontman for the seminal Los Angeles queercore band Extra Fancy, Brian Grillo had the misfortune of being known more for his onstage antics and being openly gay (and HIV-positive) than for his music. Indeed, Grillo was always the most noteworthy member in the band. As a rock singer who catapulted himself off of oil cans with a decidedly aggressive swagger in the band's live shows, Grillo boldly defied gay stereotypes and helped give the queercore movement a shot at the mainstream. Nearly 10 years have passed since Extra Fancy almost "made it," but on his solo debut, "Stomping Back on Fire," Grillo is now armed with only an acoustic guitar and the burning desire to get a few things off his chest. He sets the tone on the gentle title track (on which he proclaims, "Sometimes you gotta make it like a soldier on the mend/Jump in and fight and kick it up again" before he closes the chorus with the declaration, "Hey, I never went away!"). It's a beautifully raw moment, and, coming so early in the set, one that bodes well for the rest of the record. On "The Other Ones," Grillo bemoans being a down-on-his-luck musician who feels alienated from his community ("I'm really getting tired of trying to beat the odds," he says later in the song, adding, "There's only so much that I can sleep off"), while on "Shutdown," he sings of being a "celebrity" whose 15 minutes have come and gone: "Once I had a taste of their celebrity/Until I found out how cutthroat it could be." But nowhere does Grillo nail his punk-rock blues more than on "Sunblind," in which he promises, "I'm going to leave it up to luck/Just say a prayer and send me on my way." The production is threadbare at best; this sounds more like a collection of demos than an actual album, but the lo-fi approach pays off, imbuing the songs with an intimacy that might have been lost with more polish. Grillo may have ditched the leather-bar bravado and oil cans, but on "Stomping Back on Fire" he shows he still knows how to rock the house."
-- Ken Knox , Frontiers Newsmagazine, October 9, 2004