#disquiet

Though their extensive discography has a distinctive through-line that means listening to any of their albums will offer recognizable signs of their unique approach, it’s impossible to predict where exactly The Necks will venture next. Their debut album, Sex, released in 1989, comprised a single nearly-hour-long piece. The Necks’ 2023 album Travel was home to four 20-minute pieces. Their new album, Disquiet, is their longest album to date, comprising four tracks ranging from 25 to 75 minutes, totaling over three hours of music. For this reason, it’s ideally suited to sharing amongst the Dusted crew for a Listening Post — it’s a lot of music to digest!

Intro by Tim Clarke

Tim Clarke: As a guitarist, I was excited to hear Tony Buck pull out his guitar for this one. As far as I can tell, guitar hasn’t been a prominent feature of any Necks album since 2006’s Chemist, which remains my favorite of theirs. My ear was immediately drawn to the four repeating, delayed guitar chords in the first section of “Causeway,” the shortest track, but also the spaghetti-western motif buried in “Ghost Net,” the longest and densest track. Despite having invested a lot of time with this music, I feel like I’m still finding my bearings. How are you all getting along with it?

Bill Meyer: It’s a big one, but each track lasts a while and has a particular character. The first piece, “Rapid Eye Movement,” feels very familiar and comfortable. I’d call it warm bath Necks. The second, “Ghost Net,” is very different. It sounds like they’ve overlaid two asynchronous rhythm tracks to make a third, bumpy one, and then kept that groove going for an hour and a quarter. It’s as disquieting as the Necks get nowadays, and I respect that. But it’s not just free jazz Necks; it’s a studio construction, which their records tend to be.

Another thing that I notice about Disquiet is that it returns to the sound of a trio. Even when there’s a lot of overdubbing, it still sounds like the work of three guys who each have an identifiable role. That’s very different from the last album, Bleed, which felt to me like a conscious step away from the trio sound.

Tim, have you heard Gemstones, the album by Buck, Anja Lauvdal, and Stale Liavik Solberg? Buck’s mainly a guitarist on that one, and he handles the role quite well. I know he has played guitar in more song-oriented rock endeavors, too, but that one’s interesting as a kind of electric free-ish ensemble.

Tim Clarke: I’ve not heard Gemstones, Bill — thanks for the heads up. Keen to check it out.

On “Ghost Net,” even though they create and sustain that crazy overlapping rhythm track for over an hour, there is a sneaky pay-off in the final 15 minutes when Abrahams hits that resounding octave-spanning piano melody to bring the piece home. I laughed out loud the first time I heard it! They really make you wait for the pay-off, but it’s worth it.

Ian Mathers: I confess to being a bit of a fair-weather Necks fan; a friend introduced me to them via 2003’s hypnotic Drive By, and even though I’ve heard and loved a bunch of other Necks records since then, it’s by far the one I go back to the most. That actually means that the diversity here that Bill notes is its most notable quality even more than the length. Any third of this would have made a perfectly satisfying album, but for me it does function as more of a cohesive arc than I thought would be possible (not least because I’m rarely going to get to listen to the whole thing without pausing at least a few times).

“Rapid Eye Movement” feels to me like it’s always approaching the brink of something, an hour-long clearing of the ground. Maybe something in the combination of the endlessly simmering percussion and the piano vamping over some sort of drone(?) in the background. You’re both absolutely right about the thrilling “Ghost Net,” the least traditionally (for whatever value that even has with this group!) Necks-like track and one that’s always lurching forwards until that piano melody hits. The graceful, drum-less opening movement of “Causeway” feels like a reaction to the irregularities of “Ghost Net,” but once the drums and organs do hit it’s thrilling. And then “Warm Running Sunlight” lives up to the name, providing a kind of prolonged, slightly dazed cooldown process. Even though plenty of the Necks’ albums are long, I was a bit skeptical when I saw three hours here, but I think they made it work.

I’ll also be interested to check out Bleed, which I somehow missed despite liking Travel quite a bit and being immediately interested in hearing what the trio does when confining themselves to a ‘mere’ 42 minutes.

Christian Carey: At a time when condensed brevity is prized, it is great to hear a group already known for stretching out expand their work even further. The music uses repetition, but it is not exact repetition and is often entrancing. The Necks also do a great job of nesting themes in the midst of all the grooving. As Ian mentioned, when a melody is introduced, it often lands at the perfect moment.

Tim Clarke: Another detail has emerged in “Warm Running Sunlight” that I hadn’t noticed before: field recordings of frogs or crickets, and what sounds like a school playground. The latter sounds are mixed in so subtly that you almost can’t make out what it is, but it works so beautifully alongside the trio’s playing.

Jennifer Kelly: I’m coming to this more or less cold, and I really like it so far. I’m especially homing in on Chris Abraham’s keyboard sounds — really nice use of organ and piano in “Causeway,” for instance, sometimes at the same time. So obviously, they use overdubs a fair amount, and I’m wondering if any of you could shed light on how much this band is a studio project and how it translates live. Is it significantly different?

I do find the track length somewhat off-putting, not that it’s boring at all and I can see how the pieces need space to evolve and unfold. Still, it’s difficult to find three hours to listen to any single thing. I do a lot of my listening on long-ish runs, and even then, the one time I have fairly uninterrupted playing time, the two hour-long tracks are more than I can fit in.

Bill Meyer: Concert Necks and studio Necks are two different things. In concert they limit themselves to piano, bass, and drums. They start with one person playing something, and then a set-long piece arises from that beginning idea. While the music is completely improvised, it’s improvised from a shared history of over three decades of working together. One way to think of the Necks in concert is that each discreet piece is about collectively developing and sustaining one set of ideas.

On record, they begin from improvisation, but they use overdubbing and all the other instruments that Buck and Abrahams play to build up the music layer by layer. They’re format-conscious; early albums tended towards single pieces that made sense on CD, some of their recent efforts have comprised side-long pieces.

I recall someone mentioning that the album has a certain arc to it, but you should know that the tunes aren’t numbered by design. Disquiet is not meant to have one playing order, and given that the tracks last between half an hour and an hour and a quarter, that makes sense. I suspect that this album will usually be played one track at a time, unless the listener is road-tripping.

Bryon Hayes: That is how I’ve approached Disquiet: pick a track and let it roll across the ears. Like Jenny, I’ve been really enjoying Abrahams’ keyboard work on this record. For example, the organ drone on “Rapid Eye Movement” marries nicely with the gentle (I assume) improvised electric piano, especially in the first few minutes before the bass and drums enter. Also, when Swanton joins in on bass, his hesitancy is compelling. He drops in short bursts of three or four notes and then drops out for a while, creating a neat sense of tension. When the three of them all finally lock in, with the addition of what sounds like chimes, the payoff is wonderful. The continuous build of energy, and then its dissipation, across almost sixty minutes is what makes The Necks’ long-form pieces effective for me.

Ian Mathers: Huh, I guess the “no intended order” thing is a bit of a casualty of digital vs. analog listening, since on Bandcamp they are kind of inescapably in the same order each time you go to play it there (easy enough to randomize on your own player once you have the MP3s, or just choose to play the streaming version in whatever order, but that’s not quite the same feel/connotation as the “unordered” CDs). And of course, while the three discs are unordered, the two shorter pieces are still grouped together. So again, unless the listener is intervening more decisively, those two kind of make up one piece (movement? something else?) of the work.

This actually means that the promo MP3s showing up without track numbers included, and me not noticing and playing them in alphabetical order, means that I heard a more randomized version than the CD one, since that stuck the shorter tracks on either side of the longer ones. None of this changes the actual sound of any of the work here, but it’s both easy and fairly common to read into things that sequencing (I definitely do it!). I’m reminded of Underworld (a group the Necks have played with!) sincerely asking listeners not to shuffle their last LP, in the spirit of wanting you to hear the flow of things the way they’d intentionally crafted it. Here the Necks are doing the opposite, and while I love the idea of it (even if I missed it in the promo copy until Bill pointed it out here) I wonder how many listeners are just going to default to the same order most or all of the time.

Tim Clarke: This is an interesting point, Ian. I don’t think I’ve actually made the time to listen to more than one of the tracks in a single sitting.

Bryon Hayes: Interestingly, this isn’t the first time that The Necks deliberately left the track numbers off of a release. Unfold, which is a double LP, has no side numbers either (although the Bandcamp tracks are in a specific order). They are purposefully “allowing her to navigate his (sic) own path through the soundscape at hand”. “Her” and “his” being the listener, of course...