Grouper – Shade
Kranky – Out Now
Liz Harris’ back catalogue as Grouper has become a go-to soundtrack for lonely afternoons in twilight dusk, as days seep away and seasons fizzle out.
Whether it’s on the short but stunning Paradise Valley EP or in the eerie pastoral of Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill, her music always carries her unique mix of devastating sadness and soothing ambience. Sometimes bleak but always beautiful, she creates atmospheres that are both warm and stark, merging textured folk with fuzzy drone/noise.
With new LP Shade comes a surprising clarity in both her voice and guitar that suggests newfound confidence in her craft and self, a songwriter coming out of her shell. That’s not to say the album doesn’t possess Harris’ trademark vulnerability. The lyrics on Shade are certainly mournful. But her voice and songwriting is more clearly defined here, emerging from the reverbed haze of her previous albums.
This is particularly the case on stand-out tracks ‘Unclean Mind’ and ‘Kelso (Blue Sky)’. On the former, she is “held inside a party, catered by the mind, for emotional behaviour, and irrational design”. The clarity of her vocals and lyrics – so often obscured on previous albums – coalesces with melodious alt-folk guitar, announcing the album onto the listener after the ambient fuzz of opener ‘Followed the Ocean’. And yet, despite the honesty, there is still the pain and honesty that so often typifies her lyrics as she sings, “you leave me hanging all the time, your fingers pulled inside me, they’re cutting through me”.
On ‘Kelso (Blue Sky)’ her voice and guitar is almost completely clean, with few effects apart from a warm reverb glow that accentuates her natural tones rather than obscures them. It’s a sumptuously warm song, with her humming and circular guitar evocative of 60s folk singers. The lyrics are typically mournful but also tender, as she sings, “can’t believe that I don’t get to see you, one more time, I asked you how you were doing, and you said ‘fine’”.
The album is described as being born out of her relationship with the oceans and rivers in the Bay Area. The use of the ocean and water as a theme and metaphor creates a sense of space across the album, and she uses this to frame a vast interior expanse. On ‘Pale Interior’, she sings “look into the light of a pale interior, where blueness moves along the edges, to the hiding place where clouds align”. On ‘Disordered Minds’, a hazed melody and accordion-like pulse oscillates strangely, quickening and hardening, growing almost like a migraine.
But there’s a tenderness in the songwriting that anchors the album and prevents it from feeling remote or abstract. On ‘The Way Her Fair Falls’, she repeats the refrain “it’s only me to see something pretty inside the day, the way her hair falls”. The repeated vocal and guitar is simple but is granted an added intimacy as she allows cracks in her playing onto the record, both her voice and guitar stuttering halfway through.
And on ‘Promise’ her lyrics again showcase the tender frailty that is so typical of Harris’ music in general but is expressed most clearly on Shade, as she sings, “you got the prettiest eyes, that’s not what I like about you, you got the prettiest hair, that’s not what I like about you either, I know you take good care of me, and I like that”.
The magic of Grouper is how Harris lets you into the touching yet tragic aspects of her world. While Shade perhaps doesn’t quite possess the textural warmth of Paradise Valley or the hypnotic pull of Dragging a Dead Deer, its greater clarity and confidence offers a glimmer of hope that is perhaps unprecedented in Harris’ previous music as Grouper.
Order via: Rough Trade | Bandcamp