The first time I heard and saw Liz Harris perform under her Grouper moniker was in 2009, when she opened for Animal Collective after their meteoric rise to relative fame with Merriweather Post Pavilion. The crowd, a robust and remarkably enthused group of largely teenagers and college students, were all hot and bothered at the prospect of Animal Collective playing a presumed hour and a half rendition of “My Girls” and bobbing their heads manically until their collective necks ripped at the tendons.
Needless to say, they were not prepared for Grouper. Neither was I, actually; like much of the crowd, I spent most of her haunting set loudly discussing with my friends how long tonight’s rendition of “Fireworks” would be. Occasionally I even made a snide comment about Harris’s shimmering wall of crooning vocals and off-beat guitar. I, very unfortunately indeed, compared her to The Edge, citing one-trick-ponyism and a cloying over-reliance on her reverb pedals over technical prowess. A girl next to me, in an apparent act of empathetic rebellion, puked all over her shoes. It was a dour moment for most of humanity.
Things have changed since then and I have too, but I still squirm a little thinking of my voracious rudeness and closed-mindedness during that opening set. How Harris must have looked down at me, singled me out as just another name on her “people-who-talk-during-my-show-hitlist” (as I wade in perpetual worst case-ness).
And now, years later, I wonder if maybe, lurking amongst the deluge of eerie vocals, twittering pianos and chiming guitars, some splintered remnant of that night has found its way into Harris’s most recent release, The Man Who Died in His Boat.
I use this, of course, as less a narcissistic claim-to-fame but instead as a convenient segue. Harris’s music, for better or for worse, is best described as the music of memory. Nostalgia and poison recollection trickle from every pore of her songs, leaking from one vaguely defined tune to another.
It’s right there in the title, after all—Harris’s recent collection reflects upon a boat she and her father visited, washed up on shore and still littered with the remnants of life but devoid of any life itself. “I remember looking only brie?y, wilted by the feeling that I was violating some remnant of this man’s presence by witnessing the evidence of its failure,” Harris recollected in a recent press release.
Much like Leyland Kirby’s oft-discussed (mostly by me) project The Caretaker, an endeavor which revolves around the deliberate distorting of old ballroom songs to recreate the sensation of the ghostly banquet in "The Shining", Harris’s music looks back to the past and sees nothing but haze. The tone isn’t set as either morose or revelatory; it’s some sleepy middle ground, where facts and objectivity have been marred by the mists of time.
The title track, for all its sour implications (failure, spiritual voyeurism, gruesome death, etc) is a relatively upbeat number, more a thing of beauty than the grotesquery of a man slowly dying alone many miles from his home. Though, if you close your eyes and listen really closely, you can almost picture a moment of serene epiphany in the shimmering chord progression. A moment where the titular man, looking up through the clouds, knows he is about to die, knows and yet still finds peace.
All of The Man’s tracks are culled from Harris’s monumental Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill sessions, so they all follow the same general outline of that particular collection. Hushed and impenetrable vocals—half words, half seraph-chant—flow like running water over a wall of acoustic guitar reverberation to create a molasses-slow universe of pure sleepiness. A good third of the tracks are early indicators of Harris’s A I A period obsession with a purer refinement of drone and ambient music, and “Vanishing Point” eschews all reference points entirely for three minutes of hushed piano rattles, like someone absently tapping on keys, trying to recall a song they learned a long time ago. They may be effective b-sides, but no Grouper is ever bad Grouper.
The issue here, then, is that Harris is as divisive as ever, because to some people all Grouper is, in fact, bad Grouper. There will always really be just two camps: the sweaty crowd at the Animal Collective show and the folks who opted out of the show entirely to sit in their collective rooms and mull on their collective pasts. You’ll know where you sit almost immediately after you first listen.
Rating: B+
