Always different, always the same. This phrase was used by the late John Peel to describe his favorite band, the Fall. His observation about the Fall captures a broader idea about music fandom, describing what it's like to follow along with a gifted artist who has created her own style but is no hurry to move outside of it. Always different, always the same. It's a phrase that comes to mind for me when I listen to the charred ambient music of Liz Harris' Grouper. Her body of work is of a piece. She layers ethereal vocals that feel less like floating in the clouds and more like sinking into the dark earth, possibly while inside of a coffin; her music is a downcast mix of strummed acoustic guitar and defiantly analog sounding drone and noise-makers. With this small clutch of elements, she's made more than a half-dozen full-lengths and a number of singles and EPs, all of which sound like they could come from no one else. Indeed, the distinctiveness of Grouper is easy to take for granted. There are so many people making music that could fall under the broad heading of "dream pop," but nobody sounds like Grouper.
There is one record in the Grouper catalog that, while certainly cut from the same frayed cloth, stands just slightly outside of the rest. Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill, first released in 2008, mostly forgoes the drones and minimalist experiments of her other work and focuses on Harris' voice and strummed guitar. It's her "folk" record, in a way, even though it slots in easily next to her more drawn-out and noisy releases. It is also her best album, a classic of subtly devastating songwriting (it's also an album Pitchfork initially underrated). Around the same time she was recording Deer, Harris cut a handful of songs in a similar vein for a planned album that was never released. Five years on comes The Man Who Died in the Boat, a companion record to Deer (which Kranky is also reissuing on vinyl) that shares many of its characteristics and essential appeal.
Grouper's most obvious contemporary is Julianna Barwick, but while the latter's music has a certain formality and sense of communal ritual, Grouper is disconcertingly interior, as if you're listening in on something private. That feeling is reinforced by the more abstract moments here, which often feel like something tinkered with over many hours in a dark room. The opening "6" finds Harris' voice on a damaged tape, bubbling up from the depths and mixing with swirls of feedback. The haunted "Vanishing Point" consists only of warbly metallic pings over a deep bed of tape hiss. The instrumental interludes aren't necessarily much to listen to on their own (and Harris' personal stamp on them is not as strong), but they do serve a purpose on the album, mixing up the flow of acoustic songs that might otherwise start to bleed together. But placed in relief by the abstracted bits, the individual character of the acoustic songs becomes apparent.
Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill had one of the more striking album covers in recent memory. It's a photo of Harris as a small child, wearing heavy makeup and a black dress that could look like a witch's costume. Though she doesn't generally seem interested in conveying the exact meaning of her songs and leaves a certain amount of that to the listener, the unsettling side of childhood innocence is a pervasive theme in her music. On the best of the songs here, like "Clouds in Places", the title track, "Cover the Long Way", Harris sounds very much like she's taking sing-song rhymes from childhood and running them through a cracked and ashen filter. They radiate a beauty that is simultaneously light and dark, with bright melodies draped with the inevitability of death.
The title of this release extends that idea, alluding to a scene from Harris' childhood where she and her father came upon an empty boat that drifted to shore after the person in it disappeared. It's one of those flashes from long ago that stays with you, an early brush with the idea of mortality at a time when you're not capable of understanding exactly what it means. That sense of confusion, the difficulty of processing and articulation, seems built into Grouper's art. Talking to people about her music, people who are typically ready to share half-formed opinions about music of any kind, I find they often have trouble coming up with words; when it really hits, as it often does here, the music of Grouper creates a feeling that can only be defined as awe, an uncanny mixture of wonder and dread that nobody does better.
