Review Summary: Unstaunched attention span
The Necks have nothing to prove to anyone at this point, which is all the explanation you need for why their latest record
Bleed exists in the form it does. Their central enterprise is well-charted – a jazz trio churning a single prismatic nugget through their keys-bass-drums matrix until an album's worth of improv has materialised, evolved, and made you question everything you thought you knew about capital-M minimalism – and it's withstood umpteen minor permutations. Admirers of the group's classic one-song, one-album, one-hour formula have welcomed bipartite structures and extra hands into the studio (
Aquatic), braced themselves as drummer Tony Buck took leave from the kit to chip and scrape away on his guitar (
Chemist), and long since accepted that a Necks record can contain as many tracks as it pleases so long as each treats the thought of a ten-minute runtime as a skimpy baseline (
Unfold). The more things change, well, the more chances one has to
get the opening minutes of a Necks joint as intuitively as a beat-perfect movie scene, only to find question whether they
still get it when they're locked into the same shot quarter of an hour later.
As per last year's
Travel, the Necks are still near-peerless in their mastery of a riveting tableau, but
Bleed gives the sceptical listener an uncustomary amount of leeway to question why they stepped into the cinema to begin with. Ignore the familiar premise of its sole, forty-minute title-track — this is anything but a standard Necks experience. Like nothing else I've heard from the group,
Bleed bears a terminal fixation on negative space; takes an uncompromising step into their minimalist suit and inclines it firmly away from the rapturous Steve Reich-adjacencies that spiralled out of
Aether and
Chemist's "Abillera", instead plunging headlong into netherspace and ruthlessly resisting any impression of structure that threatens to emerge from its fractured cycles.
Pianist Chris Abrahams is the prime conspirator here, his trickles of notes and smattering of chords rarely predictable or tidy enough to amount to a 'progression', and bassist Lloyd Swanton's sonorous, assuring tones only ever seem to appear behind them to catch you off-guard, refuting any doubts that he's walked out of the studio entirely. The album devotes the entire first half of its runtime to Abrahams tinkering around in the dark while Tony Buck's ambient percussive flourishes periodically stir the air for him; it gives itself up midway to wholesale silence before coming round to a piece-defining focus-snap (in uncharacteristically discontinuous fashion, the single piano note struck at the 22:07 mark marks the pivot and apex of the whole track); its most graspable outline only arises when Abrahams' knotty chord cycle is gradually overtaken by layers of distortion in the final quarter – the decay here suggests more than the form itself. The upshot plays like an epilogue to a narrative that never begins, and by the time melodic resolution and full-band chemistry do make an appearance in a surprise coda, you'll have long since abandoned any expectation of encountering them at all — those minutes land more like an injection of crime scene pathos than an earnest attempt at delayed gratification.
If that's a hard sell, then rightly so! I, for one, did not
get this album at all on first pass: I found it gaseous, unwelcoming and frustratingly unclear about the kind of piece it wanted to be. It forced me to unlearn everything I thought I took for granted with the Necks, and it wasn't until my second time round that I realised what an accomplishment this is for a thirty-five-year-old Known Entity to pull off — and having conceded this, I couldn't help but marvel at how imperiously the trio hold the floor with little more than empty space and sleight of hand.
Bleed demands that you love the Necks for their shadowplay and actively scorns any other attitude; it withholds anything approaching a hummable note and makes its audience painfully conscious of how dry their throat has become by the end; it takes the passage of time, traditionally a factor as arbitrary to the Necks as air pressure or shoe size, and weaponises it into a source of grit, of attrition, of unnourished expectations, of anti-immersion, of the same ceaseless discharge of attention one gets from staring into an unlit room (those lights are never coming on, and that gloom is always, always stirring). It may be unfriendly and demanding beyond a level I've ever experienced from the Necks, but it is so meticulously, disarmingly constructed as such that it might just stand among their most intriguing works to date; leave any expectations of an easy ride at the door, and you'll shocked at how expertly it drains you.
