Piotr Kurek plays it stone-faced. His music teems with strangeness, yet even his most outré pieces have a lulling effect; it’s uneasy listening that casts a blissful spell. Make no mistake: The Warsaw composer’s music is way out there. His records are miniature worlds where the usual laws don’t hold. Kurek loves to blur the line between authentic and ersatz, natural and synthetic, cause and effect; resolutely tactile instruments like vibraphone are balanced by ethereal wisps of Auto-Tune. Drop the needle anywhere, and you might hear cybernetic bagpipes; holographic harps; voices that might be cellos, or vice versa. For someone who frequently writes for theater—an art form based on real people moving around in three-dimensional space—he’s got an uncanny knack for making even the most physical sounds feel disembodied.
After the diaphanous, shape-shifting chamber jazz of 2023’s Smartwoods, Kurek’s new album Songs and Bodies seems at first like a move back toward solid ground. It’s billed as an interrogation of ’90s post-rock bands like Gastr del Sol, Labradford, and the Sea and Cake; peer past the woozy strings and miasmatic layers of processed vocals, and it almost snaps into focus as a trio record for guitar, bass, and drums. Kurek’s trickiest move this time may have been to hire such a rock-steady rhythm section: Bassist Wojciech Traczyk and drummer Mateusz Rychlicki’s playing provides such a firm anchor that at first you may not notice the strange water around it—rolling with unexpected swells, peppered with bioluminescence, and swimming with otherworldly creatures.
This is the most groove-heavy Kurek record yet, by a considerable distance. Following the pastel swirl of the introductory “Forever / The Way In,” “It Used to Be a Song” digs into a slow-motion, backbeat-heavy rhythm; with watery string vamps drizzled over spidery clean-toned guitar, it sounds a little like Tortoise jamming out an improvised rendition of something they’d encountered on Mo Wax’s Headz compilations. A brief snippet of cut-up soul in the outro strengthens the implied hip-hop connection: It sounds like Armand Hammer’s billy woods and Elucid could be rapping over it.
Those deep, beveled grooves are all over the album, crisp hi-hats and muscular electric bass providing a solid counterpoint to the vaporous qualities of Kurek’s guitars and digitally distressed vocals. “Nothing Holds Still,” a highlight, channels the hypnotic repetition of Oren Ambarchi’s music, pairing a sinewy bass-and-drums groove with snakelike guitar and a searching, overdriven solo that might be harmonica. The dubby “Try to Be True,” another standout, ruminates on a two-chord vamp beneath scratchy guitar picking and hiccupping phonemes that sound like a voice trying to break through from another dimension. The group’s sleight of hand is so compelling that it took me a half-dozen listens before I registered the presence of the wordless background sighs that give the song its eerie emotional charge, echoing the Congos’ downcast angel song.
Kurek’s last album hovered like a luminous mist; it could be hard to remember in detail once it had finished playing. The new one, though, is frequently almost catchy. The dry, gently distorted guitars of “More Than One” and “Songs and Bodies” call to mind early-’00s Smog records; “The Water Is Wide” moves with the strummy insistence of early emo. But even at his most rocking, Kurek seems to revel in misdirection—theremin-like melodies that summon attention away from the center; overlapping layers of onion-skinned dissonance. The wandering melodies have a mazelike effect; the uniformly slow tempos contribute to the narcotic mood. I don’t think that’s accidental. Kurek is a trickster at heart. His love letter to post-rock is a palimpsest of sweet nothings, a vibed-out tapestry of riddles.
