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Tim Hecker, “Haunt Me, Haunt Me Do It Again” (Subtractif (2001), Alien8 (2010), Kranky (2018))

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Newly reissued on Kranky, Haunt Me, Haunt Me Do It Again was Tim Hecker’s remarkably fine debut album under his own name (he had previously been releasing techno as Jetone). Revisiting it now as a long-time Hecker fan, I find it still stands up as a great album, yet there is surprisingly little about it that presages the visionary career that would follow in its wake. At the time of their release, both Haunt Me (2001) and its follow-up (Radio Amor) merely felt like a couple of the better albums to emerge from a thriving generation of glitch-inspired, laptop-wielding artists centered roughly around Mille Plateaux. As such, Haunt Me was very much an album of its time, but that time was truly a golden age of experimental music: this debut was just one of many enduring gems from a period where it seemed like the flood of crucial albums from Fennesz, Colleen, Jim O’Rourke, Oval, Ryoji Ikeda, Alva Noto, and others was never going to end.

It was interesting to go back and read about how Haunt Me was initially received upon its release, as it feels quite bizarre in hindsight to view Tim Hecker as a techno producer or an experimental guitarist. Nevertheless, he was both of those things and there are some overt shades of each swimming around Hecker’s warmly stuttering and skipping drone bliss. The opening three-part “Music for Tundra,” for example, sounds very much like the dreamily indistinct thrum of E-bow drones. While Hecker’s background as a guitarist is certainly responsible for the enveloping, soft-focus heaven of languorously sustained chords at the album’s core, the true magic of the album lies in how he disrupts and manipulates that idyll with an ingenious arsenal of hisses, crackles, crystalline bubbles of synth-like tones, and a host of more aggressive and gnarled intrusions.

There is also a very free-wheeling and kaleidoscopic sense of experimentation that runs throughout the album, as if Hecker had a rough idea of how he wanted to sound, but was still testing the boundaries of that vision. For example, the third part of “Arctic Loner’s Rock” sounds like an ephemeral radio transmission of a pop song that that has been stretched and reversed by mysterious atmospheric forces. Elsewhere, “Border Lines (Part Two)” resembles a time-stretched fire alarm that gradually gets consumed by a chorus of alien insects.On the opposite end of the spectrum, Hecker nods to his techno roots with an understated beat in both “Boreal Kiss” and “Night Flight To Your Heart.” Notably, it is the same beat each time, which illustrates another curious feature of Haunt Me: extremely unusual sequencing. There are multiple song suites that seamlessly segue into one another and motifs from one piece often resurface again elsewhere. That sense of looping familiarity adds nicely to the album’s fever dream atmosphere.

Most of Haunt Me‘s highlights come in the middle of the album, the best of which is the sole piece that is not part of a song suite: “The Work of Art in The Age of Cultural Overproduction.” Clocking in at over seven minutes, Hecker’s wry Walter Benjamin homage is the album’s heart and centerpiece in both duration and inspiration, transforming the album’s usual drones into something more viscerally churning, roiling, and machine-like. Rather than feeling like another gently lysergic meditation, it instead resembles a rumbling and lumbering juggernaut that keeps relentlessly moving forward despite its individual components constantly splintering, skipping, and dropping out.

Hecker continues that hot streak with the gorgeous two-part “October” that follows, in which a lovely, shimmering, and submerged-sounding loop slowly wends its way through a sea of tape hiss. The following “Ghost Writing” is similarly beautiful, as warbling and indistinct snatch of melody lazily drifts like smoke until it gets transformed and obliterated by something resembling an electromagnetic storm (albeit one featuring an unexpected cameo from Regis Philbin). While those pieces are the most memorable ones to my ears, Haunt Me does not feel like a series of discrete pieces so much as a sustained, flickering, and dreamlike spell. Moments of sublime beauty continue to surface throughout the entire album—the aforementioned handful of pieces just happen to stand out because the album’s hallucinatory flow reaches a crest around the halfway point.

While the broad strokes of Haunt Me‘s aesthetic have lingered throughout Hecker’s career and make it instantly recognizable as his work, it is quite a bit less distinctive than his later fare. The reason for that has a lot to do with scale and heft, as the understated Haunt Me aesthetic of gently skipping ambient warmth resembles an established milieu far more than the blown-out, sensory overload onslaught of his more recent work. There is nothing remotely as harrowing as Virgins or as rapturous as Love Streams on Haunt Me—just the quiet pleasures of sublimely shimmering and ephemeral dronescapes.

As such, Haunt Me is kind of a curious entry in Tim Hecker’s discography, as it is classic of a genre and is frequently hailed as a Tim Hecker classic as well (primarily because it was most people’s first exposure to his work), but it is arguably a mere shadow of the more staggering albums that came further down the line. Or maybe not, as plenty of people prefer this more vaporous and haunted side of Hecker’s work and miss its lightness of touch (art is subjective as hell, it seems). In any case, Haunt Me is a stellar album and I am genuinely thrilled to see it back in print. While Hecker’s ambitions were considerably more modest back in 2001, his intuitive genius for harmony, texture, mood, emotional depth, and craftsmanship were present right from the start.

Samples can be found here.

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Grouper, “Grid of Points” (Kranky, 2018)

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Liz Harris’s Grouper project has taken on quite an unusual and fascinating trajectory over the last several years, transforming into something that feels like a slowly unfolding series of poetic postcards from a ghost. Grid of Points, the most recent window into Harris’s soul, continues to further distill the stark and tender fragility of 2014’s Ruins, unfolding as a 22-minute suite of gorgeously ephemeral piano sketches that blur together to weave a hypnotic spell. I suppose the word “sketches” conveys a somewhat unfinished aesthetic, which is not far from the mark, as these sessions were unexpectedly curtailed by a bout with high fever. In a deeper sense, however, that fever was providential, as these pieces are perfect in their spectral elusiveness, evoking (as Harris herself puts it) “the space left after matter has departed, a stage after the characters have gone.”

Notably, these seven pieces were recorded several years ago during a brief 2014 residency in Ucross, Wyoming. Grid‘s predecessor, Ruins, was also recorded during a residency (that time in Portugal, back in 2011). That approach of short bursts of intense creativity followed by years of reflection is quite an unusual creative process, as a willingness to slow down and thoughtfully craft something as quietly devastating as Grid of Points is quite rare. I would be curious to know how much material Harris discarded from these sessions, as these pieces feel like they have been tenderly reduced to their absolute essence, leaving only the most soulful and heavenly residue behind. Occasionally, that tendency can admittedly be a bit exasperating, as the lovely and hymn-like opener “The Races” does not even stretch to a full minute. The delicious flipside of that, however, is that Harris occasionally floors me with something like the achingly gorgeous and utterly sublime “Parking Lot.”

Structurally, “Parking Lot” is very much representative of Harris’s vision for the entire album, as the remaining five pieces are all variations of elegantly simple piano melodies married to languorous and lush vocal harmonies. The only real difference between “Parking Lot” and the rest of the album is that its vaporously beautiful vocal melody is an especially stunning one. The halting and slowly cascading melody of the following “Driving” is yet another highlight, but it is definitely “Parking Lot” that steals the show. I cannot think of many other pieces that are so deeply soulful, emotionally direct, and elegantly simple. Harris has come quite a long way from her murkily reverb-swathed early days (though they were great too).

After that impressive run of opening pieces, Grid”s simple and understated approach starts to blur into something a bit more amorphous and dreamlike. There are still actual songs, but the melodies are not as prominent or memorable. That said, it does not feel like Grid is front-loaded with its best work so much as it feels like the album is slowly dissolving and dissipating into a pleasantly hallucinatory fog of rippling arpeggios and blearily floating vocals. Intriguingly, that steady descent into soft-focus languor sets the stage for the unexpectedly sensual and experimental final piece “Breathing.”

Initially, “Breathing” recaptures some of the swooning and lyrical melodicism of the album’s opening pieces, almost resembling a seductive R&B ballad reduced to just breathy vocals with a skeletal, one-finger piano accompaniment.It is definitely a great song while it lasts, yet it unexpectedly gets swept away by a surprisingly loud field recording of a train after about two minutes. That move is an impressively perfect and inventive way to end such a delicately dreamlike and quiet album, cathartically rumbling through the fragile idyll and leaving only the slow fade of its chugging engine behind. It is both climactic and deliciously ambiguous, simultaneously evoking a wistful longing for faraway places while also feeling like the inevitable intrusion from the outside world that erases all traces of Harris’s quiet, fragile, and soul-baring reverie. I especially love that the train’s lingering wake is given just as much time and importance as the song itself, blurring the line between art and life and giving the album a very real sense of place (it was recorded on cattle ranch in Wyoming, after all).

If this were a normal album by a normal artist, I would probably be a bit disappointed that Grid of Points is incredibly short for a full-length and only contains a few memorable pieces, yet it feels weirdly perfect for a Grouper album: this is not so much a batch of songs as it is a lovely oasis of simplicity, depth, and sincerity undiluted by any clutter or conspicuous artifice. This is a very direct and vulnerable album quite unlike anything else that is being released these days. While Grid is probably too brief to be a legitimate contender for the best Grouper album, “Parking Lot” is certainly one of the most rapturously beautiful pieces that Harris has ever recorded and the album as a whole is unquestionably another significant leap forward in Harris’s evolution as an artist.

With her palette reduced to simply her voice and a piano, she has taken her work in a transcendently timeless and pure direction, straining to eliminate anything and everything that dilutes or distracts from an intense and direct emotional connection—all that might ring false or inessential has been burned away, making Grid‘s extreme brevity a strength. Grid of Points is very much the result of a lengthy and thoughtful distillation process rather than a dearth of new material. Naturally, that internal struggle to make something truly deep and meaningful has slowed Harris’s output considerably in recent years, yet the results are certainly worth it: the rare moments when everything falls into place just right are truly special and damn near ecstatic. Grouper is like a once-mighty spring that has gradually slowed to a quiet trickle, yet magically spits out a diamond every now and then. With her last few albums, Harris has gone far beyond being a good songwriter with a distinctive aesthetic, blossoming into something of a visionary, using the most basic and unadorned palette to transform pop-like song structures into deceptively radical and moving art.

Listen here.

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Dedekind Cut, “Tahoe” (Kranky, 2018)

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I cannot think of many other projects that have been quite as instantly revered as Fred Welton Warmsley III’s Dedekind Cut, nor can I think of any other artists who could comfortably fit in at both Hospital Productions and Kranky. Tahoe, Warmsley’s first album for the latter, admittedly focuses primarily on Dedekind Cut’s more meditative, drone-based side, but there are still some moments (“Spiral,” for example) that would not seem out of place on a Raime or Haxan Cloak album. That shifting and elusive aesthetic sometimes leads to some unusual sequencing choices and disorienting mood shifts, but any potential grumblings I may have about Dedekind Cut’s fitfully focused vision are silenced by how gorgeous these pieces can be when Warmsley hits the mark (which he does with truly impressive frequency). This is one of the best albums that Kranky has released in a long time.

While Dedekind Cut is a fairly recent endeavor, it is actually just a new chapter in a much longer career, as Warmsley has been steadily releasing hip-hop and dance albums for almost a decade under the name Lee Bannon. That goes a long way towards explaining Warmsley’s formidable talents as a producer, but it does not make Dedekind Cut’s rise any less impressive, as there is not a huge amount of crossover between fans of Ninja Tune and people buying post-industrial drone tapes. I suppose there were some hints of a more blurred and ambient bent in the last few Lee Bannon albums, yet Dedekind Cut is very much a radical reinvention, a change perhaps best illustrated by Warmsley’s recent unerring genius for choosing iconic and provocative cover art for his full-lengths. 

The dark and striking art for Tahoe is an especially interesting and perverse choice given that the album is largely inspired by the serene beauty of Walmsley’s scenic surroundings (he now lives in Lake Tahoe). The art nevertheless feels weirdly apt though, highlighting the bleary, haunted undercurrent that subtly darkens otherwise heavenly reveries like “The Crossing Guard.” That pervasive ambiguity is what makes Tahoe such an unusually compelling release, as the glacial flow, understated nature sounds, and warm chords of the title piece all embrace blissful tranquility, yet they are swathed in enough murk and hiss to suggest that none of it is quite real. 

At its best, Tahoe feels like a hallucinatory and bittersweet plunge into swirl of happy memories being experienced in a distant and lonely place. An entire album in the vein of those two pieces, the swooning bliss of “Equity,” or the lushly rapturous “De-Civilization” would probably be an absolute masterpiece, but Warmsley’s mercurial muse leads him down some other paths as well. Some are great, while others are a bit less so.

For me, “MMXIX” falls in the latter category, as its gothic choral touches, choppy synths, and bizarrely shifting structure awkwardly disrupt the album’s dreamlike spell. It a baffling piece from start to finish, opening with a flourish that calls to mind Oneohtrix Point Never’s more bombastic moments, then dissolving into a surreal fugue of Tuvan throat-singing and benignly radiant New Age shimmer. I suppose that makes it one of the album’s more ambitious and experimental pieces, but it is alternately too fractured, too pastoral, and too heavy-handed to quite fit with the surrounding material. 

Tahoe‘s other divergences fare far better, however, resembling corroded negative images of the album’s more lovely moments, albeit still with their own ephemeral flashes of beauty. “Spiral,” for example, sounds like it may have once been a quietly beautiful composition like some of Tahoe‘s other fare, but got twisted into a grotesque caricature of sharp treble; grindingly metallic textures; and swirling, dissonant overtones. Deep into the jabbering cacophony, there is a calm, structured chord progression unfolding, yet it is almost entirely eclipsed by what feels like a sustained howl of anguish. 

Elsewhere, the epic “Hollow Earth” is initially a feast of deep, hollow drones amidst evocative field recordings of natural night sounds. That soon dissolves into a gorgeous interlude of distantly reverberant choral music, but the idyll is jarringly short-lived, as the piece erupts into a roiling miasma of dense, blow-out bass; heavy drones; and arrhythmic kick drums. Rather than diving full-on into his best Haxan Cloak pastiche, however, Warmsley continually dissolves each new motif into another in a kind of languorously flowing dream logic. Eventually, “Hollow Earth” coheres into a lovely final coda of rippling waves and warmly beautiful synth melodies, which is admittedly a very neat trick. Within the sequencing context of the album, it briefly feels like Tahoe‘s blissed-out, soft-focus heaven is being ripped apart by a visceral surge of gnarled, ugliness, yet the howling gateway to hell is quickly sealed back up and everyone is (precariously) happy again.

Tahoe‘s final piece, “Virtues,” is yet another quiet stunner, resembling an achingly beautiful organ mass languorously drifting through the mists of a dream. It is perfect end to an oft-stellar album, racking up one last transcendent highlight on a release had already crossed the threshold into greatness. Even taken purely on a surface level, most of these pieces are beautifully crafted, expertly balancing warmth and melody with hissing, blurred textures to weave an immersive and sensuous half-dream. With deeper listening, however, Tahoe reveals deeper emotional heft simmering beneath the surface and unexpected shadows flickering across the lovely billowing clouds of drone nirvana. Much like some of Tim Hecker’s albums, Tahoe is the kind of jewel in Kranky’s catalog that perfectly embodies the label’s aesthetic while simultaneously deepening and expanding it. This is one of the first great albums of 2018.

Listen here.

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Disappears, “Irreal” (Kranky, 2015)

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2013’s Era was a criminally underappreciated monster of an album that marked an significant, unexpected surge forward in forging a distinctive and wonderful aesthetic all Disappears’ own. I am not sure quite what I expected from this follow-up, but it certainly was not still another dramatic evolution. That is exactly what I got though. While I still give Era the edge from both a songwriting and simmering menace perspective, Irreal takes its predecessor’s hypnotic, machine-like precision and echo-heavy minimalism and runs with it. Admittedly, the band’s brilliance is primarily stylistic this time around, but Disappears have nonetheless provided yet another thoroughly bad-ass avant-rock tour de force.

I have liked (or loved) songs on just about every album that Disappears have released to date, but Era was noteworthy in being the first where the Chicago foursome have truly sounded like only themselves, whereas earlier works always made the band’s shifting influences very apparent. To its credit, Irreal stakes out that particular (and very cool) niche even more emphatically (in fact, one of the opening lines in the title track is “I’m onnnnn….some new trip” delivered with a singularly bad-ass drawl). 

Notably, the new trip that Disappears are on sounds increasingly less and less like rock as I know it. Sure, they look like a rock band and they play all the normal rock instruments, but their strain of rock is now just as informed by dub, experimental music, and minimalism as it previously was by Neu! And GVSB. Equally important is the fact that Disappears’ rhythm section of Damon Carruesco and Noah Ledger embraces an almost machine-like (and non-rock) degree of precision and repetition, though enough fluidity still creeps into their grooves to make them perversely sensual at times.

Aside from their wonderfully simmering, hypnotic pulse, Disappears’ other major innovation is their increasingly minimal and non-traditional approach to guitars. There is almost nothing resembling a chord progression or a riff on this album, aside from maybe the stumbling, broken-sounding harmonic hook of “Irreal.” The only real exception is “Halcyon Days,” which unexpectedly boasts some chords and a delay-heavy guitar melody. In all other respects, Irreal is basically a series of excellent bass-driven grooves colored by plenty of nuanced, effects pedal-heavy guitar textures. That might not sound all that amazing on paper, but the execution of it all is both ingenious and damn near perfect. 

I cannot begin to imagine how much work went into chiseling these songs into their final forms, as few bands that I know of make better use of space than Disappears. Guitarists Brian Case and Jonathan van Herrick have almost completely carved away any traces of excess or ornamentation in their playing, so on the rare occasions when they actually do open up, it makes a real impact. Otherwise, they are more than happy to just ride a single note if it suits the song, which I greatly appreciate. Also, the relative absence of guitars creates room for neat tricks like the echoey dub effects on the drums in “Interpretation” (another highlight).

That said, there are a few ways in which Irreal falls a bit shy of its predecessor. As noted earlier, the songwriting is a bit weaker than it has been previously. That seems to be by design (the emphasis is now definitely elsewhere), but it would still be nice to have something as hooky as “Power” or “Pre Language.” The closest Irreal comes to a great single is the title piece, but it is sabotaged by an awkward segue into a three-minute outro. 

The other perplexing aspect of this album is that it greatly downplays the presence of frontman Brian Case, as his half-spoken vocals are largely treated like just another instrument. I do enjoy his disaffected mumbling, but not nearly as much as I like it when he sounds like he has a basement full of dead prostitutes. That change drives me a little crazy, as he can be one of my favorite frontmen when he is “on” (his vocals on “New House” were the definite highlight of Era for me). Consequently, I think the pendulum may have swung a bit too far towards “inhuman” with this album—a better balance between cold, minimalist perfectionism, hooks and charisma can definitely be found. 

Despite those caveats, however, Irreal is probably still my second favorite Disappears album, as the elements that do work do so extremely well: hooks are nice, but a strong, singular, and beautifully executed artistic statement is quite satisfying too.

Listen here.

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Tim Hecker, “Virgins” (Kranky, 2013)

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It is hard to believe that Tim Hecker is still managing to pull fresh rabbits out of his hat seven solo albums into his career, but Virgins is an expectation-defying monster of an album. While it certainly still sounds like a Tim Hecker album in a broad, general sense, several of these pieces feel far more like dissonantly avant-garde classical music than anything resembling laptop soundscapes or crackly ambient music. I mean that in the best possible way, of course, as this is easily the heaviest, most complex, and most disturbing thing that Tim has ever done. It is also the best.

As much as I love Tim Hecker, I have always thought of him as something of a meditative, meticulous, and predictable sort, destined to continually impress me with his depth and craftsmanship, but unlikely to ever knock me sideways with any surprises. Consequently, I was completely blindsided by the gnarled harmonies and roiling immensity of the Virgins‘ opening “Prisms,” which resembles nothing less than an all-enveloping sonic nightmare. It is not a particularly long piece, but it definitely sets a very disquieting mood for the rest of the album: I guess Tim Hecker was finally ready to bare his teeth and get a bit scary.

Fortunately for the album’s listenability, however, Hecker also tackles quite a few other moods over the course of Virgins‘ duration, making for a wonderfully varied and dynamic arc. To his credit, Tim rarely returns to familiar territory without adding some kind of twist. The most prominent innovations are probably the aforementioned digressions into neo-classical territory, which manifest themselves in somewhat muted form in the clean, rippling minor key piano reverie of “Black Refraction” and warm, flute-like harmonium of the aptly titled “Amps, Drugs, Harmonium.” However, even reprises of some older directions include unexpected improvements like buried beats, a melancholy woodwind melody, or a shivering insectoid hiss.

Hecker takes his classical aspirations into rather extreme territory, however, with the two-part “Virginal,” the second part of which easily steals the album. Even the first part is a bit overwhelming though, sounding like classical minimalism layered into oblivion and processed until it becomes a buzzing, groaning, and crunching nightmare. It feels a lot like being trapped in a room with a dozen deafeningly amplified music boxes playing out-of-sync, clashing notes until I start to go mad. The second half then somehow reprises the same motif, but makes the dissonance even more jarring and unhinged-sounding until it evokes nothing less then absolute, grinding horror. That is a stunning accomplishment in its own right, but Tim outdoes himself by burying small oases of musicality within even the most clangorous hellscape and also manages to segue into and out of teeth-rattling dissonance so seamlessly that it all feels perfectly natural.

Virgins is the rare album where almost every song stands out in some way. For sheer jaw-dropping power and vision, “Virginal” cannot be topped, but Hecker also offers up quite a few moments of sublime warmth and beauty (“Radiance” and “Live Room Out,” for example), as well as a pair of very different pulse-based closers (“Stigmata II” and “Stab Variation”) that I loved as well. That said, all of the individual songs bleed together to create a fluid, complex, and absolutely devastating whole, which is how Virgins demands to be heard.

I honestly cannot praise this album enough, as Hecker has now reached a plateau for sound art that I would not have imagined prior to hearing this album. While some of these pieces certainly forge new territory, the most striking aspect of all is how so many pieces of the puzzle come together at once. Virgins succeeds brilliantly on literally every level: the songs are great, the sequencing is perfect, the transitions from fragility to crushing density feel natural, the production is absolutely immense-sounding (Ben Frost was back): even the textures are inspired, as Hecker skillfully balances his more processed-sounding laptoppery with warm woodwinds, sharply percussive piano, and a healthy amount of metallic grinding.

In short, Virgins is absolutely essential. It is also probably a once-in-a-lifetime achievement, as no sane person would ever attempt something this ambitious, complex, and multilayered twice. If I were Tim Hecker, I would have concluded these sessions by dropping my laptop in the garbage, high-fiving the engineer, then vanishing to a houseboat in the Caribbean forever.

Listen here.

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Disappears, “Era” (Kranky, 2013)

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This Chicago band’s career trajectory has been a singularly impressive and curious one, as they have somehow managed to continually reinvent their sound while still getting exponentially better with each new album. Era makes that trend seem even more remarkable, as Disappears have made yet another huge leap forward despite tampering with what was arguably their best feature (Brian Case’s dissolute-sounding, deadpan vocals) and losing drummer Steve Shelley to Lee Ranaldo’s new band. As it turns out, neither are really missed, as the band more than compensate by paring their aesthetic down to pummeling, machine-like precision mingled with great hooks and well-placed eruptions of chaos.

The first time I put this album on, the opening “Girl” made me nearly jump out of my skin, as its transition from a clean, unadorned bass riff to full-on rock fury could not have been more abrupt or unexpected. As far as songcraft goes, it is far from the album’s best moment, but its collision of drum solo, guitar squall, and obsessively repeating, heavily processed vocals achieves quite an impressive amount of brute force while staying grounded enough by its bass line to feel like a groove. 

It is no small feat to sound explosive for the entire duration of a four-minute song, but Disappears somehow did it. Presumably exhausted afterward, the band settles down noticeably for next six songs, but a few core motifs from “Girl” stick around for the duration, namely the use of guitars as a textural tool (rather than a melodic one) and Brian Case’s surprisingly effective tendency to endlessly repeat brief phrases (and slather his vocals with effects).

The following “Power” is a bit of a mixed bag, as it finds Case regressing a bit into his former GVSB/Mark E. Smith-esque vocal affectations, but he certainly sounds cool doing it and it is probably the album’s strongest choice for a single, mixing a darkly sexy groove, subtly snarling wah-wah, and quite a bit of laconic, syllabically enhanced charisma. 

The album’s other two stabs at fairly straightforward rock (“Era” and “Weird House”) do not quite hit the same heights, but “Weird House” does offer some appealing unhinged vocals and some neat guitar sounds. Fortunately, the remaining songs are all great enough to compensate for any comparative lulls the album might have. The least of them, “Elite Typical,” is a bit of a throwback to early Gang of Four/Pop Group-style post-punk (which I am the target demographic for), but the other two are a bit more unique (and both are also inarguable career highlights).

Due to both its length (9:30) and sheer greatness, it is hard to see “Ultra” as anything other than the album’s centerpiece and crowning achievement. It certainly has a lot going for it, as it combines an alternately stomping and stuttering beat with some kind of machine sample, loads of elegantly restrained guitar abuse, and some of Case’s most cryptically menacing vocals (centered around an echo-heavy deadpan mantra of “If you go, I’ll go”). 

Of course, it is the execution that matters most and that is where Disappears shine brightest, particularly the rhythm section: the groove is insistent, yet constantly shifting, maintaining a strong tension without ever quite offering any kind of relief or catharsis. Also, in a broader sense, “Ultra” could only be a Disappears song, a significant achievement for such a historically chameleonic band, particularly since they manage to sound unique through restraint and understatement (no real choruses, no real melodies, no real riffs).

That said, my favorite song of all is the closing “New House,” which has stayed stuck in my head for weeks now. Much like “Ultra,” it is built upon little more than a subdued drum part (just toms and a high-hat) and a looping bit of machine-noise, but it is even more sparse this time around and Case’s vocals are even more brilliantly creepy and echoing. I cannot think of many people besides Brian Case who can endlessly repeat a phrase like “a new house in a new town” until it sounds like nothing less than the ghoulish musings of a man with a backyard filled with dead sex workers (I also happen to be target demographic for ghoulish musings, btw).

Era is truly a landmark album for this formidable foursome, as everything has finally come together. While it is not quite perfect from start to finish, it may as well be. It is hard imagine any way that its best parts could have been any better: it is basically a master class in how to sound amazing, as Disappears prove that all you need is a strong rhythm section, some good ideas, enough space for those ideas to make an impact, and enough time to strip away anything that detracts at all from overall badassness. 

Equally importantly, Era is both the first Disappears album that I can happily listen to in its entirety and the first album where there are some brilliant songs that sound distinctly like Disappears and not like Disappears skillfully channeling one of their many influences (I am almost certain that I will be dismissing new bands as “too derivative of Disappears” within the next couple of years). This is going to be all over “best of 2013” lists in a couple months.

Listen here.

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Grouper, “The Man Who Died In His Boat” (Kranky, 2013)

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To celebrate their reissue of 2008’s acclaimed, widely beloved, and charmingly titled Dragging A Dead Deer Up a Hill, Kranky has concurrently issued this surprisingly solid companion album of unreleased recordings from the same period. Nearly all of these pieces adhere to Deer‘s aesthetic of strummed acoustic guitars amidst a warm, dreamlike haze, but the hooks are not nearly as strong or frequent this time around. With most artists, that would generally mean “these songs were not good enough,” but Grouper has always been far more about atmosphere and mood than “songs.”

This album takes its curious title from Liz Harris’ teenage memory of an intact sailboat that mysteriously washed up on the beach with all of the owner’s possessions still inside, but no trace of the owner. Such an evocative inspiration is quintessentially Grouper-esque, as Harris occupies a stylistic territory as melancholy, blurry, and enigmatic as a distant memory of the void left by a stranger’s death. 

While there are certainly a number of structured songs to be found, only the achingly sad (and beautiful) “Living Room” fully emerges from Liz’s characteristic fog of reverb and chorusing into clarity. The remaining songs are content to take shape fleetingly or not at all, resulting in a singer/songwriter album that sounds a lot like an ambient drone album or an unplugged My Bloody Valentine. Occasionally some understandable words, a strong melody, or an untreated guitar will appear, but the overall aesthetic is decisively warm and womblike (albeit with a lurking, omnipresent sadness).

Notably, there is almost no correlation at all between the success of a piece and how much of the original melody or chord structure is left intact or recognizable. While the aforementioned “Living Room” is probably the album’s high point, many of the other highlights occur during the pieces that have been totally liquified into a blissful haze, such as “STS” and “Difference (Voices).” 

Both pieces are little more than layers of floating, indecipherable vocal cooing and a buried hint of a guitar, but they pulse and shimmer in a hypnotically sensuous way. Wisely, Harris balances her those abstract and narcotic moments with a bit of textural and dynamic variation, periodically employing driving acoustic guitars (“Cloud in Places”), quavering feedback (“6”), and plinking, decayed-sounding piano (“Vanishing Point”).

In the past, I have felt that Grouper’s signature blend of tape hiss, reverb, song fragments, and sadness was a bit too monochromatic for my taste, but I have since come around quite a bit due to a shift in my own perspective. Taken out of their greater contest, many Grouper songs can seem like little more than wordless sketches propped up by loads of reverb, but a broader look at Harris’ recent discography evinces a deliberate drive to discard conventional song structures (and sometimes even words) in favor of something much more dreamlike and impressionistic. 

Still, Liz can craft a wonderful hook when she wants to, which is why It is easy to see why most of these songs were cast-offs from Dragging a Deer: the songs on that album offer much more in the way of immediate gratification. Despite that, The Man Who Died in His Boat is a remarkably cohesive and satisfying effort in its own right—it feels far more like a more abstract, varied, and experimental sister album than anything resembling a collection of outtakes.

Listen here.