Grouper is sound in black and white. Peering through a telescope, lost and alone at sea. Bleak, lonely curls of fog span the view. Or wind on some forlorn, forgotten hill. A weighty fish lumbering with concealed purpose below the murky depths of a cold, dark lake. Grouper is music to drown to.
On the heels of last year’s breathtakingly gorgeous double album A I A: Alien Observer/A I A: Dream Loss, Grouper, the moniker of Portland-based songwriter Liz Harris, is releasing a new collection of material from 2008 titled The Man Who Died In His Boat. Overall, it’s a good album from a great artist, certainly worth a listen for anyone who’s already a fan. But the real treasure here is that along with The Man Who Died In His Boat, Grouper’s label is reissuing her out-of-print, under-acknowledged and reverb-drenched masterpiece Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill.
A friend first described listening to Dragging a Dead Deer to me as the closest you could be to dreaming while sober and awake. He said it was like walking barefoot on wet grass at night. From the moment the album begins with the aquamarine textures of “Disengaged,” it’s hard not to feel swallowed up, as though swimming through a bed of seaweed with water filling your ears. Lyrics are present but indecipherable; delicately strummed acoustic guitar notes are there but they’re indistinguishable. Trying to stay awake until the album is finished is akin to fighting against the current.
The whole of Dead Deer is beautiful melancholy; Harris’ s voice is fragile and curious like an undated photograph of an anonymous bride. Few of her words pierce the nimbus of wet tremolo and tape hiss. But occasionally, as though hearing someone whispering from behind closed doors, snippets about drowning, rising water and falling asleep can be made out through the murk.
Trying to distinguish one song from the next proves a difficult and ultimately unnecessary exercise. The album functions more like lapping waves with crests and valleys, making listening a patient and time-rewarding experience. With each listen, compositions begin to take shape out of the haze, and it becomes apparent that lurking underneath all the reverb is some truly excellent songwriting. Tracks like “Heavy Water/I’d Rather Be Sleeping,” “Stuck” and “Fishing Bird (Empty Jutted in the Evening Breeze)” certainly represent crests of achingly beautiful chords and melody that rise out of the depths and fold back into it.
Ultimately, Grouper is an experiment with background as foreground. Last year’s A I A was 80 minutes long—intentionally the average duration of one sleep cycle—while Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill provides an intangible and artful ambience for continents to drift to. The final track, “We’ve All Time to Sleep,” is a lullaby that gently washes the album out to sea. “We’ve all gone to sleep/We’ve all gone to bed/We wait for our dreams to fill our head,” Harris fades.
Set in no particular trend or place in time, Dragging a Dead Deer is not an album to listen to once and move on; it’s a sunken ship filled with hidden treasure that must be explored. It’s a fountain of wealth and reward to be tapped, so long as you’re willing to put forth the effort to do so.
Rating: A+
