When I first came across The Necks via their recent-ish album
Travel, I was convinced their appeal was a more patient, somewhat less kitsch version of the sluggish “dark jazz” catered to the kind of people who secretly idolise the likes of Bohren & der Club of Gore but would be unlikely to admit this publicly. As with many things, I royally missed the mark there - the truth is a good deal more intricate. The Necks, all three of them, draw on a practically bottomless pool of improvisational talent and band chemistry, and set these to a deceptively vast scope of moods and methods. Their albums typically consist of one-song one-hour improvisations on a simple motif, and their approach is concerned with relentlessly mining this to inconceivable depths rather than the familiar improv trope of treating it as a launchpad for however many spontaneous departures; the styles they employ to that end can be triangulated between the three poles of jazz, minimal and ambient (usually in that order).
However, the Necks’ sixth studio record
Aether turns that order on its head and offers the perfect antidote to everything I initially assumed about them – its developments are glacial, its atmosphere delicate, its note choice tasteful, its dynamics are fascinatingly fragile, and it’s so hesitant to introduce anything approaching rhythm or melody that the vocabulary of jazz is hardly touched upon. This is a minimal piece through and through, though its fibre is so sparse that you can effortlessly queue it as straight ambient. Think
Music For 18 Musicians performed by, well, three musicians at a fraction of the tempo and you’re halfway there - drummer Tony Buck and bassist Lloyd Swanton accent the piece with meticulous judgement, but this is pianist Chris Abrahams’ album through and through, and the way he recalls Reich’s minimalist pulse-and-shimmer is all the more wonderous for the solo-shaped spotlight cast on his performance from start to close. The album builds immaculately - where 1999’s almost-superb
Hanging Gardens was too dark and kinetic to sustain an entire hour despite the band’s best efforts,
Aether takes its 63-minute expanse in its stride, making for the Necks album most sensitively tailored to a patient audience (from those I have heard). Its appeal, let alone its gratification, has to be earned: the opening ten minutes do little more than to assert the tempo and the band’s uncompromising vision of sparseness, but the way these heave and sigh and
breathe and brush against the occasional guiding-star piano note throughout the majority of the album’s runtime makes for one of the most trenchant, binding reveries I’ve heard from any given band. By the time the final quarter-of-an-hour comes around in a rapturous ascension that makes for an absolute must for any Reich fan, you’ll be amazed at the extent to which you require rousing (the highest of compliments, in this case). I feel I spend a lot of time writing about albums that both create and inhabit their own space, but if there ever was a single case-in-point to encompass that whole phenomenon, this might be it. Absolutely sublime stuff.
