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Grouper
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Description: | CD on Type |
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| Format: | CD | |
| Genre(s): | Experimental / Abstract | |
| Label: | Type | |
| Price: |
£10.29
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| Availability: | Sold out / currently unavailable. Sorry! |
...according to our Brian on 01 October 2010.
Grouper. More commonly known as Liz Harris, she's become a real cult smash on the underground in the past 2-3 years and many of us here have been seduced! Many of her works are built around elements such as long, decaying, fuzzed-out drift 'n' drone washes, often with eerie, gliding disembodied vocals hovering spectrally in the ether. This album is a different beast though. There's a lot of hazily strummed acoustic guitar plus a deliciously weird chamber vibe throughout and her (beautiful) voice sounds multi-tracked & amorphous which adds a real air of otherworldliness & mystique to proceedings! This is a more intimate song-based album than some of her ghostlier outings and I think there's definitely strong psych-folk elements to this record. Yet it kind of has its own unique spiritual agenda & soundworld. Is it post-post-rock? It is certainly a rather haunting and spellbinding listen! I'd surely recommend it to fans of Christina Carter in that there's something beautifully ethereal yet very earthy & pure about this Woman's music.
Portland, Oregon based Liz Harris might have achieved a significant fan base thanks to the whispering, near ambient vocal crusades of her debut album ‘Way Their Crept’ and its follow-up ‘Wide’, but those with a careful ear would have heard slightly more trapped beneath her fuzzy chain of effects. ‘Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill’ marks a departure of sorts for Liz which sees her turn down the fuzz-boxes which caged (and to some degree defined) her sound and allows her voice to ring out above everything else. It is an album steeped in the world of dream-pop, a genre pioneered by the likes of 4AD’s Cocteau Twins and This Mortal Coil, and far from shy away from the reference Liz has instead grabbed on with both hands, in the process creating an album’s worth of perfect, leftfield pop songs.
Using delicate song structures which are at once both familiar and alien somehow we hear her words cry out hauntingly over stripped down guitar lines and looped environmental recordings. Just listen to ‘I’d Rather be Sleeping’, a track that could be a mournful take on Belly, albeit with a more fragile heart. These unforgettable harmonies and vocal lines that embed themselves in your consciousness before you even realise it are the key to the album’s success and the reason why it makes such a lasting impression. There is something to Liz Harris’s music that defies the time, makes you sit up and listen in an age where we’re told that recorded music is disposable. These are the future soundtracks to love, despair and ultimately hope.
