The overall sound of The Key tends toward a hard-edged, rocky sub-species of post-punk, but in Chris Corsano’s hands, everything is up for grabs, and those genres become mutable and malleable.
Chris Corsano has been spoiling us. There barely seems to be a month that goes by without a new release featuring the New York-based drummer’s extensive talents. The list of people he has collaborated with is mind-boggling and includes Six Organs of Admittance, Bill Orcutt, Sir Richard Bishop, Björk, Jandek, Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore. You don’t get that kind of work without being the very best at what you do. But as well as being a genuine contender for the title of best drummer in the world, Corsano is also a highly skilled composer and improviser in his own right, and some of his most impressive music can be found on the six solo albums he has released since 2006’s The Young Cricketer. The Key (Became The Important Thing [& Then Just Faded Away]) is a solo record in every sense: Corsano plays every instrument and is responsible for the mixing and the record’s cover art.
Opener, I Don’t Have Missions, has a clang and thrust to it, a pressing, swelling tempo punctuated by moments of taut guitar that push post-punk aesthetics in the direction of experimentalism. Corsano, the drummer, is rightly lauded, but Corsano, the guitarist, is more of an unknown quantity, and on I Don’t Have Missions, he shows himself to be highly accomplished, sensitive and economical. Here, the overdubbing of guitar and percussion creates a kind of approximation of a rock band, like something a hyper-intelligent alien would produce if you provided him with the right ingredients. A similar effect is achieved on The Full-Measure Washdown, a satisfyingly scratchy piece of DIY jazz-punk.
Much of the rest of the album is focussed, unsurprisingly, on Corsano’s ultra-tight and highly distinctive drumming. He has developed a ‘string drum’ – a silicone string stretched across a snare – which he plays alongside his regular kit, and which enables him to create pieces with frankly astonishing levels of tone and timbre. Collapsed in Four Parts is an exercise in density and sonic claustrophobia, Corsano’s beats thickening into static then stretching out in heavy, metallic chains. Low Experience plays with ideas of smallness and minimalism, foregoing natural time and rhythm to create something that sounds both spontaneous but carefully measured (though the mathematics used to make those measurements are unfamiliar).
The strange timings of Low Experience feed into the next track, Unlike an Empty Box, which begins with trepidation but soon finds itself scuttling along, embracing a freeform skittishness that is closer to experimental jazz than to rock or post-punk. He has the unique ability to make a solo drum improvisation sound like something made by a whole collective of musicians, and the extra resonance provided by the string drum only emphasises this. The final track, Everything I Tried to Understand Wasn’t Understandable at All, displays Corsano’s most innovative, unorthodox side. Not many drummers could make their instrument sound like a swarm of insects invading a Japanese taiko drumming festival, but he manages that and more besides, piling one rhythmic flourish on top of another and layering it all over a buzzing, resonant base.
The overall sound of The Key tends toward a hard-edged, rocky sub-species of post-punk, but in Corsano’s hands, everything is up for grabs, and those genres become mutable and malleable. This is an album of freewheeling creative fervour, indebted to the worlds of free improv and jazz. Not a moment of it is anything less than engaging, and it is frequently astonishing.
The Key (28th June 2024) Drag City Records
Order The Key: https://www.dragcity.com/products/the-key-became-the-important-thing-then-just-faded-away
Bandcamp: https://chriscorsano.bandcamp.com/album/the-key-became-the-important-thing-and-then-just-faded-away