Review Summary: softly as you leave her
i don't know Grouper's music very well. i can't tell you if this is similar or dissimilar to her previous work or expound on how, though i can tell you happily, sharing a secret, that the vocal swells and cracks of Blouse rend my heart, the rich resonance of echoing piano chords is as immaculate in effect as it's haunting in affect. this is unusual, considering that most artists who put out albums i like as much as Dead Deer and Headache have their oeuvre rudely inhaled within five business days, but; there's something intimate about listening to Grouper's work that's different from how we usually talk about intimacy in music. most of such music acts as interlocutor, a communion between yourself and the emotional affect of the album, where your needs are prioritised and you're made to feel close, familiar. disclose anything to it and it will be a sympathetic ear and companion.
Grouper subverts the expected relationship between listener and artist by inverting the model, creating a new kind of intimate music. i'm not sure how she does it -- ethereal, vaguely angelic (which is to say, maybe, alien) vocals, spellbinding musical arrangements with more than a smidge of warning about them (how long, one has to ask, before one crashes on the rocks) -- but you're HER confidante, and you are expected to take that mantle accordingly. there'll be an element of detachment or misdirection, as no-one ever tells you everything at once, if indeed they tell you anything at all, mostly we have to intuit inflections of certain platitudes (those would be the overtly seraphic elements of the album in this context) and make certain leaps to get any kind of meaning? i don't know. it's a work in progress.
another thing, the album is short. not that this should put you off: the yearning choral 40 seconds of The Races achieves heights many artists would struggle to achieve in 40 minutes, and there is a surprisingly diverse vocal range, and all the songs sound different from each other, although these thanksgiving and birthday songs depict occasions she couldn't out of bed for (the final chords in thanksgiving song especially feels overwhelming hopeless and fragile)
so it's a discomfiting listen not in spite of but because of the fragility, the way the vocal lilts never resolve and don't always act in concert with one another, tiny, minimalistic piano chords augmenting the melancholy and even those piano chords seem disparate from one other but by the time the coda, a field recording of a train (slowly) meandering past, one feels inexplicably moved, almost as if you've seen a particularly affecting piece of art -
oh. grid of points. pointillism. a collective whole comprised of small dots of colour, each distinct from the other but which coalesce to form a whole picture. in art, where it emerged, it was largely a structural innovation and its advent has long past, with even pop art referencing it ironically, but in music, if this album is any indication, it found a beautiful bedfellow.
so the discrete piano chords and whispered coos and pleas and vocal rises and bizarre juxtaposition of vulnerable runs and detached chords form
a whole which can be reduced to the sum of its parts or taken on its own merits it's
on one hand a very good ambient pop album and then when you solve the puzzle it's a staggering one.
that train: this is the end of the line, please get off
i've given you what you need
what you do with it is up to you
