The Necks – Bleed

Fish Of Milk / Northern Spy

In a noisy, over-stimulated world, The Necks‘ new album Bleed provides the perfect antidote — an intimate homage to quietness and what can be done with the emptiness between.

The trio’s masterful restraint is awe-inspiring, reactively jigsawing each other in a delicate balancing act. Chris Abrahams‘ piano explodes. Single notes spaciously spread, light followed through by dark; their dying tails softly dissolving to be filled out by droning colour. Tony Buck‘s purring percussives and shimmering metallics as droplets pearl between are abstractly brushed, then suddenly left to fall off an echoed waterfall.

The production is outstanding, full of attentively curling dramatics that lure you inward, then burst wayward with a thrilling clarity. The layered interplay always weaving, a surprise to be savoured, gloriously bent up, flamboyantly fired into sweet oblivion.

A sparring head space (best experienced on headphones) questioning the elasticity of time as transitory and reflective space is toyed with, prising poignantly to tip tongue back into the licourice light. An absence that’s pregnant with exception or air hung in anticipation … but measured to absolute perfection.

Plenty of genuine magic ensues, overlaid and blurring. The doppelgängered flick of Lloyd Swanton’s double bass, his hazily intertwined guitar floating silvery though. Artful atmospherics gently wind-chimed to tightly nailed trebles. Fluid repeats gathering up and scattered, hum-clustering a lovely atonal scoop to warmly fold a glinting aspic, then lapis-leopards a rewarding unison that sedately ends this forty-two minute odyssey.

These three lads have a knack of transforming the ordinary into something extraordinary and this album is another sweet reminder of that fact.

-Michael Rodham-Heaps-