Liz Harris has always made claustrophobic music. In fact, her albums are so memorable precisely because of this tension between the feedback-heavy reverb of her instrumentation and the sweetness of her vocals and melodies. With record titles like Cover The Windows And The Walls, Harris makes it clear that her smothered, amorphous sound is not accidental; she makes the listener dig for the beauty in her songs.
But the beauty is always there, which is what makes Grouper such an exciting artist. It also makes her latest double-LP, A | A: Alien Observer and Dream Loss, such a revelation. Grouper’s music here is more spacious and dynamic than it’s ever been; the depth of sonic textures has become all the more apparent, like the difference between 2D animations and 3D CGI.
The titular track of disc one is an excellent example. The backing keyboard is clear; it echoes, of course, but it’s recognizable and tangible. And Harris’s typically gorgeous melody is fleshed out by distinct vocal harmonies and (somewhat) understandable lyrics. Harris is “looking through the night sky” only to realize that she is an “alien observer in a world that isn’t mine.” Her “night sky” is at once comforting and foreign, enthralling but forever distant; the same could be said of these songs.
Her willingness to expand and experiment wish her signature hazy sound pays off wonderfully. On “Vapor Trails,” gentle electric guitar slides in the background like a lullaby. A similar guitar sound on “She Loves Me That Way” approaches the crunch of garage rock. “Mary, On The Wall” begins with the sound of a music box winding up as cars zoom down a faraway highway, almost as though Harris had recorded the track beneath a highway overpass.
This highway-overpass atmosphere carries over onto the second disc, Dream Loss. It grows louder on opener “Dragging The Streets” until it mimics a great gust of wind before giving way to an surreal antique piano–another example of the creepy/lovely dichotomy that’s so prominent in Grouper’s work. “I Saw A Ray,” meanwhile, comes closest to the staticky sound of Way Their Crept, but even here the noise is less amelodic, the guitar work less nebulous. If anything, Grouper’s newfound clarity serves to highlight the strength of her songwriting ability; “Soul Eraser” and “Atone” are among the best songs she’s ever written. “No Other” flirts with the synth-heavy drone of Allegory of Allergies-era Emeralds, though it’s a bit more muffled and mellow than the latter’s overpowering electronics.
The double LP comes to a close with “A Lie,” on which her vocal harmonies shift pitches like moaning ghosts and a distant solitary guitar fills the listener’s headspace with static and reverb–yet again, distant but comforting. A | A is an album full of such ambiguities, but above all else, it’s clear that Liz Harris is only getting better with time. I can’t wait to hear what she comes up with next, though these thirteen new songs should hold me over for a while.
