Review Summary: Necks³
Were it not for their frankly sorcerous command of slow-cooking, viscous intrigue, the Necks would be naught but hapless Chins! Long infamous for demanding and, given the chance, dispelling marathon lengths of patience, the jazz/minimalist improv trio's creeping repetitions have an uncanny knack for pointing at an alluring, unwavering
something in the gloom, just beyond the edge of each iteration; much of their best work is built less on what is played than what is suggested just out of sight. You'll hear this in a myriad guises throughout their discography, from the appropriately seedy overtones of their debut
Sex to the tense cruise of 2003's
Drive By – hell, even 2001's Reichian
Aether dredged its share of murk to make way for a luminous climax. Across hour-long, structurally unassuming tracks, the group's performances gradually gestate into something too complex and subtly contorted to culminate in a clean birth: your typical Necks experience simply starts and ends, with perhaps the occasional shift in tone but rarely anything so marked as a peak or release.
Now,
Chemist bears an interesting relation to this scheme: released after what many would consider the peak of the trio's one-hour-one-song years, it saw them embrace the more concise format of three unrelated tracks of twenty minutes apiece, posing the question of whether their suggestive powers could exert the same magic with tighter legroom, only (shock horror) to furnish a decently convincing answer and lay the table for later 'song'-based outings such as
Unfold,
Three and last year's
Travel. This shift in footing had little impact on the pacing of individual tracks –
glacial is still the ballpark for all three – but it did coincide with some of the most approachable palettes and atmosphere that had appeared on any Necks record at that point.
Opener "Fatal" manifests this as though our good gang were tasked with kicking down the doors on a 4-hour Italian-American crime odyssey, launching out with a staggered drum fill (!) and promptly settling into an ominous progression that takes the most foreboding overtones of
Drive By and drags them into outright menace. The band found novel means to capitalise on the dramatic potential here: drummer Tony Buck overdubbed electric guitar parts for the track, at points expanding the arrangement with raked picking, howling tremolo and shimmering feedback, but for the most part using the guitar as a clattering rhythm instrument to flesh out his 6/4 drumbeat. It's a muscular piece by anyone's standards, and packs just enough amplifier worship to evoke the likes of "Static" or "Goodbye Enemy Airship" from the more sophisticated screwdriver-jabbers in second-wave post-rock: a momentous crescendo constantly seems to lurk around the corner as such, but while the band certainly border on this in the mounting pressure of the final minutes, they never allow this to overturn the track. It eventually disintegrates without fanfare, less a 'payoff' and more a shrewd twist that takes the traditionally kitsch dimensions of noir and crams them with more patience and dynamic nuance than practically any other act would know what to do with; anything that can be said about the Necks' relationship with intrigue goes double for this piece.
If "Fatal" is one long tease, then the closer "Abillera" is about as close as the Necks get to an extended burst of instant gratification. Get through the red herring of its plodding bass overture, and the following piano drone opens up a solid quarter-hour of blissful ambience, intents and purposes be dratted. Between the melodic generosity of Chris Abrahams'
gorgeous cascading keys and Tony Buck's uncharacteristically direct beat, practically on the verge of a straight motorik, it's all too tempting to adopt a pitch to the tune of
what Radiohead dreamed of playing when they wrote "Weird Fishes/Arpeggi" – given how resplendently the track exemplifies the band's own discipline and chemistry, we shall steer clear of such comparisons (pfft). If there has ever been a point at which the Necks dropped the conceits of suggestion and intrigue entirely, only to go all-in on aesthetic wonder, this is surely it (one also recalls the rapturous finale of
Aether, but "Abillera" is far less challenging a piece as a whole).
The central piece "Buoyant" provides a midway refuge for the Necks' more demanding qualities, showing the trio at their most inscrutable and requiring the audience to squint a good deal harder to make out an overall focus. The majority of the track is comprised of an evasive cymbal pattern and high-frequency electronic chirping, around which piano and bass maintain a loose call-and-return; the upshot is akin to eavesdropping on a conversation held entirely in Morse code, and it isn't until past the 13-minute mark that Buck breaks into an increasingly syncopated beat and adds some measure of approachable shape to the piece. One hears echoes of his work on
Hanging Gardens here, though the music here is far more mysterious than macabre. As on the older piece, Buck's keynote performance renders him the standout player; as on "Fatal", the band terminate the track by cutting short its central momentum (in this case, the percussion) and leaving it a generous window of freefall – once again, the improvisatory grace which they bring it to land boasts more appeal than a climactic 'high' would likely offer for this band.
Taken together,
Chemist's three tracks have little in common besides the distinctive performance style of the three musicians in question. A loyalist would call them
complementary and insist that this is a balanced record as such, but the Necks' central appeal has always lain in their unflinching thoroughness rather than 'balance' for me. True to its title, what identity
Chemist does have as a full-bodied-album-record-yessir is built on change and willingness to experiment – it lacks the unified clout of a
Hanging Gardens or
Aether as such, or even the zany momentum of an
Aquatic, but its comparatively digestible format is still a good look for the Necks and, hey, if you're looking for your own damn baptism, this may well be the one…
