Last time we heard from Brokeback, on the 2003 album Looks at the Bird, they sounded positively alien. The band, a long-running side project for Tortoise and Eleventh Dream Day's Douglas McCombs, had stiffened up, sometimes getting lost in a welter of meticulously constructed electronics. But 10 years later, things are markedly different. McCombs has lost bass player and longstanding Brokeback member Noel Kupersmith, and has mostly shed the jazz and electronic leanings of past records under this name. Instead, he's assembled a simple guitar-bass-drums lineup, perhaps deciding he'd reached a point of no return for the post-rock template he partly had a hand in defining. This album unhurriedly shifts through themes-- notably the Duane-Eddy-meets-Morricone feel that's something of a signature for McCombs-- but at its center it's all ragged glory, guys banging out riffs and solos, a clear-cut delve into the rock firmament. You can practically feel the band members blowing the dust off their old plaid shirts and cracking open a six pack. There's nothing "post" about it. This is distinctly past rock.
Neil Young's work with Crazy Horse looms large over the all-instrumental Black Rock, with McCombs and his band digging hard into Young's preference for creating greats beds of warm, fuzzy guitar noise. A signifier of Chicago post-rock has always been its tightness, a desire to execute songs with minimal waste, drawn from a telepathic understanding between its various players. But finding such an understanding doesn't always need to result in music that can barely breathe, as demonstrated by Young's intuitive riff-trading in Crazy Horse. McCombs seems to understand that as well. It's hard not to see this record as a big sigh of relief, born out of the joy in syphoning his music through a looser framework. Even the backstory behind the album is overly familiar-- it's all diligent weekly practice sessions, working out the kinks in songs through live performances, lucking into an opening slot on a friends' tour (in this case, the Sea and Cake). The only thing missing is a yellowing Rush poster peeling away at the corners on their studio wall.
Prior Brokeback albums could feel desolate-- Field Recordings from the Cook County Water Table is a stark, lonely record-- but here the tendency is toward a much fuller and brighter sound. Occasionally there are nods to the band's past, such as the twangy "Everywhere Down Here" from Looks at the Bird, which forms a thread that McCombs picks at again on "Gold!" from this album. The moodier side of Brokeback's music criss-crosses with some of McCombs' work elsewhere; "Gold!" is even a hark back to the less uptight passages of Tortoise's "Glass Museum". It's all much straighter, less fussy than before. There's nothing here as intricate as "After the Internationals" from Field Recordings. Instead, there are hints of the dusty trails Calexico have largely made their own (in the twin tracks "Tonight at Ten" and "Tonight at Eleven"), and twists of neo-noir provided by an often-deployed sea of reverb ("Who is Bozo Texino?"). Mostly it's hard to escape the endless soloing, which weaves a prickly trail through the songs, swelling out to maximum effect on longer efforts such as "Will Be Arriving" and "Don't Worry Pigeon".
McCombs has enjoyed a varied career, often altering Brokeback radically with each passing release, so it's not a total surprise to find him bucking his tendency to deliberately work against the conventions of rock. But it's hard not to feel a little disappointed that he couldn't come up with a fresher take on the common tropes he works with here. The closing 11-minute long "Colossus of Roads" just sits in place, falling into the trap of sounding like a lot of fun to play, but far less enjoyable to actually sit through. Other Chicago post-rock musicians have veered close to this space before-- Bundy K. Brown's 1996 album Directions In Music, recorded under the name Directions, is an excellent example of how to taper rock excesses into something more palatable. The Black Rock succeeds on occasion, but the weight of McCombs' past is a tough load to bear in situations like this. When you know someone is capable of giving rock a thorough disemboweling, it's hard not to think of opportunities being squandered when presented with something so forthright.____
