There is something endearingly cheeky about the way Drag City describes David Grubbs’ releases for the label as his pop albums. Little on Grubbs’ latest release will likely register as pop music, at least for any listeners who might reasonably expect that description to mean hooks, choruses, or hummable melodies. At the same time, Grubbs’ overall body of work is so expansive and unwieldy -- bridging as it does various streams of avant-rock, multi-media art, and academia-- that it would be a challenge to find any particular box to squeeze him into. On his first solo album since 2008’s An Optimist Notes the Dusk, there are guitars, some song-based material, vocals, and recognizable lyrics, so perhaps pop music is as good a description as any, eccentric and deconstructed though it may be.
It feels like a bit of a stretch to call this a Grubbs solo album. Grubbs’ resume, of course, is a long one, including not only stints in seminal post-punk acts Squirrel Bait, Bastro, and Gastr Del Sol, but also a catalog of collaborations that reads like a cross-platform who’s-who list: Loren Conners, Rhys Chatham, Pauline Oliveros, Tony Conrad, Rick Moody, and on and on. The Plain Where the Palace Stood proves no exception, as here Grubbs is joined by the multi-talented C. Spencer Yeh, drummer/composer Andrea Belfi, and guitarist Stefano Pilia. Grubbs’ open-ended and elliptical playing style gives his guest musicians generous room to operate, and several pieces here sound less like solo work and more like the work of a fully operational band.
For the most part, however, the sound of the album is organized around Grubbs and his guitar. Largely avoiding the folk touches of such past works as The Coxcomb or A Guess at the Riddle, here he sticks almost exclusively with electric guitar, generating a series of resonant droning pieces, as well as a couple of full-group cuts that might have listeners of a certain age hearkening effortlessly back to the Louisville of the early 90s. Though the word “experimental” sticks to Grubbs like a faded tattoo, there is little on The Plain Where the Palace Stood that covers ground that he has not crossed many times before.
This is not necessarily a bad or disappointing thing. The opening title track, which features a vivid cameo from C. Spencer Yeh’s scrabbly violin, is as close as Grubbs’ deliberate music can come to sounding careless and risky. Here, as elsewhere on the album, Belfi’s drumming is marvelous, providing an inventive textural counterpoint to Grubbs’ thoughtful if sometimes static guitar lines.
Only four of the album’s 11 tracks have vocals, and, true to past form, the lyrics of “I Started to Live When My Barber Died” and “Ornamental Hermit” consist of brainy and rather inscrutable prose, thrusting his listeners into narratives that seem to have begun before we got here. It is perhaps telling, then, that the most memorable (though not exactly catchy) tracks here are instrumentals. The herky-jerk “Super-Adequate” recalls the influence that Squirrel Bait and Bastro once exerted on bands like Archers of Loaf or Polvo. And on “A View of the Mesa” and “Abracadabrant”, Grubb’s solitary guitar tones hint at the panoramic Western drones of Earth or Barn Owl.
Framing the album are three wordless pieces entitled “First Salutation”, “Second Salutation”, and “Third Salutation”, which include the album’s only acoustic guitar work, as well as burbling electronic drones and rumbling percussion. Though they contain lively passages, these pieces tend to pass by rather anonymously, and serve to prevent the album from maintaining much sense of cohesion or momentum. However one chooses to tag it, the album shows that Grubbs’ music and his relationship to pop convention remains as distanced, fitfully frustrating, and stubbornly idiosyncratic as ever.
