Liz Harris' music thrives on liminality. Her canny blending of tape loops, field music, and psychedelia strands us somewhere both familiar and strange: Dusty old pianos, chirping frogs, and a defiantly beeping microwave counted as some of the most persistent instrumentation on her last album Ruins. Whether she's releasing new material as Grouper or collaborating with bluesmen and noise savants (Roy Montgomery, Xiu Xiu, and Tiny Vipers), Harris builds up immersive, perplexing landscapes, tearing it all down just as we're starting to figure out where, exactly, we are.
For her latest creative venture Helen, Harris has teamed up with Eternal Tapestry drummer Jed Bindeman, bassist/guitarist Scott Simons__,__ and a mysterious, possibly mythic third collaborator (more on her later). Despite its purported origins as a thrash band, Helen's sun-baked ambient lands somewhere between My Bloody Valentine's distorted bliss and Eternal Tapestry's psyched-out experiments. Upon cursory listens, the band's debut album, The Original Faces, appears to be an accessible, if noisy, entry into the shoegaze-pop canon, not unlike A Sunny Day in Glasgow's excellent Sea When Absent. In all actuality, it's a little bit insane.
Harris' distorted, manipulated vocals divulge their secrets slowly, after the melodic sweetness wears off. She plays with our senses and expectations: Listeners must wade through a creaky, corrupted tape sample to reach the triumphant roar of opening track "Ryder"; when the drums finally kick in on the dreamlike "Pass Me By", it's with exaggerated, almost comic force, as though she's acknowledging our impatience. Her more nocturnal, funereal side informs the The Original Faces' best moments, particularly the achingly beautiful "Violet", which sounds like a memorial service being held 20 yards away from a Slowdive rehearsal.
The other noteworthy member of the band is the album's mysterious, unidentified backup vocalist, whose vocals sound uncannily similar to Harris but are credited separately to "Helen". Is she Grouper's alter ego? An unnamed surprise guest? The mythical Greek heroine, a symbol for unattainable, destructive perfection? These are solid guesses, but I'm partial to imagining her as a ghost, who materializes every so often to bestow the music with an otherworldly presence. "Helen"'s presence is tenuous; on cuts like "Right Outcome" and "City Breathing" her harmonies pierce the void to carry Harris' leads upward, while on "Covered in Shade" and "Allison", they're tucked away into the background. Considering the mythical connotations of Helen's namesake, her presence makes sense here as an extension of the album's interest in the divide between delicate beauty and all-consuming din.
Whatever else she does, "Helen" helps diversify the sound of The Original Faces and injects a youthful spirit into the solemn proceedings. Along with other traces of pop, like the jangly interludes "Motorcycle" and "City Breathing", she provides a respite from the surrounding gloom. These ninety-second-ish ditties are too gaunt and echo-ridden to stand alone as memorable singles, but within the tempestuous framework of the album, their vulnerability hits like a late-summer thunderstorm.
