Grouper - Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill
[Type Records]

Welcome back Type! The lauded alt imprint jogs gainly back to life, shrugging off the anchors of its New Year slowdown like Forrest Gump's disintegrating leg-braces. And talk about hitting the ground running: the latest from the label has all the timeless traits that's earned them such positive fervour in the past, rich in the blurred beauty that adorns ninety percent of their backlog.

Here, we find Portland's Liz Harris on fine form as she coos out her third LP as Grouper, presumably having drank from the same spring that carried neighbour and labelmate Peter Broderick across the pond earlier this month. Her mini-opus 'Dragging A Dead Deer...' trickles from the speakers like a kind of one-woman Akron/Family, conjuring an alien spectrum where guitars and drones are just two points on the same trend.

An old Type chestnut, you may say, but if ain't broke, why fiddle? On 'When We Fall' she shows precisely why not as she crafts a modern Country & Western requiem, all tear-stained tumbleweeds and buzzards circling the cowboy carcass, while 'A Cover Over' strums along like a more pubic version of Supergrass' 'Time To Go', with Harris providing the kind of tranquilised yodeling you could pour into a crevasse. If the female singer-songwriter tag hovering round the sleeve spells peril to the curious superficial, then it only takes a dip to realise our heroine here is a lot more adventurous than the chirpy froth Richard Curtis uses to lacquer his screenplays. This here's the stuff of dreams - vertigo and pillow-drool included.

Harris' cloudy formula holds up for most of the record's twelve tracks, ad despite the fact it's not a CD you're likely to roster into your in-car shuffler, that doesn't mean it's not worth slowing down for. Between the forty-six minutes is the space to fall asleep forever, with the temptation to count sheep only countermanded by an insistent sense of unrest that's woven into the compositions. On 'Disengaged', scarred piano patterns wobble out of an atomic pile, Harris' voice expanding in divine soprano, and 'Fishing Bird (Empty Jutted In The Evening Breeze)' seems almost topically clairvoyant given the thing that flew to Yakushima this week.

It's on the wafer-thin 'Invisible', though, that things really come to a head. A track that the touched have been thirsting after for a year now, it's a cerebral meditation that marks the peak of Harris' ambient choir. Guitars slosh at low tide while her snow-brittle voice provides just a scattering of light on the water, enough to find your way home. Truly a cracker. All in all, 'Dragging A Dead Deer...' excels in the peculiar nook it transmits from, were acoustic ruins dissolve to form a melodic, murky insomnia, and choppy-but-fragile production forces you to either submit or go back to your speed-metal.

There's something here to cherish for anyone who can appreciate the lighter side of ambient pondering: backing tapes that flicker like firelight, guitars as gentle as tinder. Grouper can do woozy like Craig Clevenger can write it.

Tracklisting:

1. Disengaged
2. Heavy Water/I'd Rather Be Sleeping
3. Stuck
4. When We Fall
5. Traveling Through A Sea
6. Fishing Bird (Empty Jutted In The Evening Breeze)
7. Invisible
8. I'm Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill
9. A Cover Over
10. Wind And Snow
11. Tidal Wave
12. We've All Time To Sleep