grouper: dragging a dead deer up a hill

Hyperbole aside, and not wanting to do Liz Harris a disservice, Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill – despite its downbeat title – represents the furthest from the shadows that her Grouper project has ever ventured. Her debut, the somewhat ungrammatical Way Their Crept, made deserved ripples in certain scenes through her unique sound, created mainly through overdubbing loads of vocal tracks and going crazy to a dubwise level with the echo effect. The result sounded like drugged ghosts bouncing off the walls of a haunted mansion, and was fecking great. Harris seems to have decided at an early stage, probably wisely, that there was only so far she could go with that particular modus operandum, and her music has become progressively more corporeal ever since.

That’s not to say she’s checked in her otherworldliness entirely, however. Despite an ostensibly folk setting – in the made-on-acoustic-guitar-and-voice sense – the heart of Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill resides in drone and repetition; and Harris’s vocals, while no longer entirely wordless, are often blurred against a shifting backdrop of murky psychedelia. The thunderstorm that begins opener ‘Disengaged’ immediately sets a foreboding tone, fading into reverberating keyboard stabs that are shadowed by Harris’s chiming, distant vocals. It’s a rather colourless and dislocating affair all round, and not the most welcoming of intros, so it’s something of a relief that the succeeding ‘Heavy Water / I’d Rather Be Sleeping’ is more traditionally engaging. Both it and ‘Stuck’, which follows, employ a simplistic guitar strum to anchor what must rate as Harris’s most unapologetically pretty vocal melodies to date. The latter in particular melts time in a most delicious manner, a refracting Cocteaus-esque atmosphere that manages both to go on forever and yet end too soon.

Harris’s craft is one of shifts of emphasis within a particular milieu, rather than any great stylistic leaps from song to song; to a large extent, a Grouper song sounds like a Grouper song sounds like a Grouper album. While not necessarily a bad thing in itself, such a strategy does raise the spectre of sameness, even boredom, across an entire album. And despite many subtle touches, like the shoal of keys that twinkles deep below the surface of ‘Travelling Through A Sea’, or some sublime spectral melodies that hark back to Way Their Crept on ‘Wind & Snow’, a feeling develops over the course of these dozen songs that Harris needs to widen her palette a bit more. Even taking into account the clutch of brilliance that opens the set, there are too many examples here where a simple guitar strum and an effects pedal simply don’t do the business. Beyond the mid-point of the album, Dragging… does just that; it’s too monotone, too grey, and there’s too little inspired tinkering with the formula. Maybe next time.

[Type; June 23, 2008]

Written by: Adam Smith

Tags: adam smith, grouper

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