The Necks – Body

Fish Of Milk (Australia and New Zealand) / ReR Megacorp (Europe and Japan) / Northern Spy (Americas)

This newbie from Australian improv giants The Necks plays a Charlemagne Palestine-like long game (or it appears so) in a snakes and ladders of subtle tone shifts and erosions. A deceptively simple premise that sleekly seduces, seeps in there, tingles in the fragmentary unison of a trickling piano and scattered percussives.

Melding the meditative, Body goes to clear (fifteen minutes in) into clatters of broken keys and protracted droneage. A fluid sensibility that plucks tinselling highlights and pulsing curves, has you happily losing yourself to its butterflying transits and reflective glints. A symmetry that slices in eddies of competitive textures and wobbly undercuts, then whoosh, out of nowhere (some twenty-four minutes in) it Comanches a kosmische of taut motorik. The drums are suddenly Liebezeit-lobed to a driven shimmer shanty of guitar and tangled piano as the previous musical composites flood back over in La Düsseldorf-like radials.

This is powerful juju that finally tapers to into a chilled aftermath some thirty-nine minutes in. A beautiful bubbling piano with twinkling metallics, floating accents washing slowly over each other as evocative funeral ivories buoyantly pointilise in crashing waves of percussion and somersaulting cymbal. A Popol Vuh-like ache that seals this as one of the group’s finest achievements to date.

-Michael Rodham-Heaps-