Post by dorkay on Jan 18, 2010 23:59:47 GMT 10
A nice one! Congratulations boys.
THE NECKS
“Silverwater”
(ReR)
“Silverwater,” like most albums by the Necks, is like land passing below you from an airplane window. It’s so big and slow that it resists description.
It’s the same for miles at a stretch: mostly piano, bass and drums repeating, repeating, repeating a grid of static sounds or short melodic figures in a cycle. There are small rolls of tom-toms, a four-note ascending bass line, a mutating organ wash, light cymbal crashes on every fourth beat. Over time the music changes, but so gradually that your mind has erased what it sounded like five minutes ago. Of course you can go back and find out, but that flattens the experience. It’s better to experience this in person, and you can do that next week. They’ll play at Issue Project Room in Brooklyn on Jan. 27 and 28. (Details at issueprojectroom.org.)
None of “Silverwater,” this Australian trio’s 15th album, follows any straight-up idiom, whether jazz or classical minimalism or rock. It imitates the surfaces of all those things, at various times. The Necks know endless ways to stretch their resources. They isolate an instrument. They make foreground slowly become background. They don’t particularly care about melody or moving harmony. What they really care about is how to articulate and repeat a short phrase, not only on their three primary instruments but also, here, on organ and shakers and — a first for a Necks album — on electric guitar, played by the drummer Tony Buck. They’ll stagger or layer different approaches to these short phrases, rendering them evenly, intermittently, wavelike.
When the Necks seem vaguely jazzlike (the big tone of the acoustic bass, the small repeated shards of a chattering drum or piano pattern), they sound full and authoritative. But the Necks imitating rock has no wiggle in it; it’s as juicy as eating dust. I much prefer Mr. Buck’s more aggressive, immediate, Fugazi-like guitar playing and drumming on “Project Transmit,” his solo album from 2008. With the Necks, it seems, his job is to delay everyone’s gratification: the audience’s, certainly, and maybe even his own.
The point of “Silverwater” is the entire creation: not just the taste of each ingredient but how it gets put into the bowl. And, of course, the slow logic of the transitions. You’re always waiting, with this band. It methodically drips all these ingredients into the mix, never breaking an even pace, and you wonder when it’s going to shake it up, displace a few things, stumble or shout: i.e., make music. Then at some point, no matter how many times you’ve heard the group before, you say, “Oh I see, this is the main event.” Yet you’re still wondering where it’s going. It’s got you twice over. BEN RATLIFF
www.nytimes.com/2010/01/18/arts/music/18choi.html?ref=music
THE NECKS
“Silverwater”
(ReR)
“Silverwater,” like most albums by the Necks, is like land passing below you from an airplane window. It’s so big and slow that it resists description.
It’s the same for miles at a stretch: mostly piano, bass and drums repeating, repeating, repeating a grid of static sounds or short melodic figures in a cycle. There are small rolls of tom-toms, a four-note ascending bass line, a mutating organ wash, light cymbal crashes on every fourth beat. Over time the music changes, but so gradually that your mind has erased what it sounded like five minutes ago. Of course you can go back and find out, but that flattens the experience. It’s better to experience this in person, and you can do that next week. They’ll play at Issue Project Room in Brooklyn on Jan. 27 and 28. (Details at issueprojectroom.org.)
None of “Silverwater,” this Australian trio’s 15th album, follows any straight-up idiom, whether jazz or classical minimalism or rock. It imitates the surfaces of all those things, at various times. The Necks know endless ways to stretch their resources. They isolate an instrument. They make foreground slowly become background. They don’t particularly care about melody or moving harmony. What they really care about is how to articulate and repeat a short phrase, not only on their three primary instruments but also, here, on organ and shakers and — a first for a Necks album — on electric guitar, played by the drummer Tony Buck. They’ll stagger or layer different approaches to these short phrases, rendering them evenly, intermittently, wavelike.
When the Necks seem vaguely jazzlike (the big tone of the acoustic bass, the small repeated shards of a chattering drum or piano pattern), they sound full and authoritative. But the Necks imitating rock has no wiggle in it; it’s as juicy as eating dust. I much prefer Mr. Buck’s more aggressive, immediate, Fugazi-like guitar playing and drumming on “Project Transmit,” his solo album from 2008. With the Necks, it seems, his job is to delay everyone’s gratification: the audience’s, certainly, and maybe even his own.
The point of “Silverwater” is the entire creation: not just the taste of each ingredient but how it gets put into the bowl. And, of course, the slow logic of the transitions. You’re always waiting, with this band. It methodically drips all these ingredients into the mix, never breaking an even pace, and you wonder when it’s going to shake it up, displace a few things, stumble or shout: i.e., make music. Then at some point, no matter how many times you’ve heard the group before, you say, “Oh I see, this is the main event.” Yet you’re still wondering where it’s going. It’s got you twice over. BEN RATLIFF
www.nytimes.com/2010/01/18/arts/music/18choi.html?ref=music