The Necks - Three

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The Quietus

Here we have The Necks’ twenty-first album. After a collaboration of more than thirty years, The Necks have become, and remain, one of the most arresting and sophisticated bands on the planet. The three pieces on offer here continue that now seemingly unshakable legacy.

I think it would be a mistake to think of The Necks purely in terms of jazz. Their reach extends to various other musical forms, finding us in a realm of highly contemporary and wilfully playful and experimental composition and performance. The musical borders are unfixed and vague – which can only be a good thing.

Where the live performances of the band are improvisational and reactive, this here feels minutely arranged. The attention to detail in such complex noise is pretty awe-inspiring. I think The Necks well understand the difference and potential of thinking of live and studio work as distinct disciplines. In reifying music in the way that we do, we open up a huge matrix of performative interstices, all of which are malleable and compositional in their own right. The Necks get this. Absolutely.

We have three contrasting moods here that well-evidence the depth and sensitivity of the musicians here. ‘Bloom’ is a work that seems to induce an arresting sense of time dilation. Its relentless rhythms and patterns cause an effect where, after two minutes it feels like it’s been playing forever, but after twenty minutes it feels like it’s over in a flash. At no point, in every listen, have I been anything but engrossed. It seems to borrow the interlocking patterns and gradual shifts employed by minimalist composition, but in a context so dense and maximalist as to seem paradoxical. It is so rich in timbre, texture and well-placed interval that the experience is stiflingly psychedelic. It’s wonderful. The subtly shifting hi-hat motif alone is a thing of brilliance. Tony Buck is a drummer of rare greatness.

What follows is a tremendous gear-shift into ‘Lovelock’ a crippling lament for Celibate Rifles frontman Damien Lovelock, who passed away last summer. Here, the density of the first track gives way to untethered spaciousness, a lack of harmonic and metric hierarchy, and drawn out gestures of atonality. Whenever we briefly find a harmonic focus, mostly provided by Lloyd Swanton’s sporadically bowed double bass, we can breathe just quickly, as the sound shifts strangely away. It’s a bit like trying to follow the shape of an octopus in motion. As an articulation of the hopeless, structureless meanderings of grief, it’s pretty powerful. I think this is probably the first time I’ve needed to consider the potential emotional charge of a drum roll. This track interchanges extended technique and simple arpeggios so beautifully. The crass semiotic structures we’ve set up to describe musical meaning in the west seem insufficient, as they always do with great music. we’ve crossed the threshold of representation and the sublime.

Third track ‘Further’ finds The Necks in more playful, and dare I say, relaxed form. Languid chords and chattering percussion play out over a solid, but unhurried 5/4 groove. It’s interesting to note that both recording and mastering engineers are name-checked as collaborators here. A status not often afforded to these roles, but it seems totally appropriate here. There is an architecture at work that has been realised not just through performance, but by capture, and the careful sculpting of the mixes. It really is outstanding work on all fronts. Each track here has a distinct and complementary topography. Places to explore, spend time in, and marvel at. The Necks remain at the top of their game.

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The Free Jazz Collective 90

By Lee Rice Epstein

Is The Necks free-improv’s John Luther Adams? Has any other group accomplished so much variety, plumbing endless depths, underneath a veneer of minimalism? And what about the impression of self-seriousness one might infer from titles that could easily pass for 20th-Century pomo social novels: Aether, Silverwater, Hanging Gardens. And yet. As an earlier album teased with its title Piano Bass Drums, a droll wit precedes moments of sublimity. Piano by Chris Abrahams. Bass by Lloyd Swanton. Drums by Tony Buck. It’s a straightforward math equation, where one and one and one make, ahh but you get the joke. The cleverest part of Three, their latest full-length, is playing against type after their brilliant 2018 album Body. Notably, the majority of The Necks albums have featured a single, unbroken recording, around an hour long, give or take. A handful of albums, including Three, feature separate tracks and appear to use a predefined structure or set of parameters, akin to, but not exactly, composition. Like many of their studio albums, Three also has Abrahams, Swanton, and Buck using production tools as a fourth voice in their ensemble, giving the effect of a hyperreal performance. The album evolves over, here it comes again, three tracks: “Bloom,” “Lovelock,” and “Further.” The opening minutes of “Bloom” ooze from the speakers, like ink dripped onto blotting paper. Because of its typical role as the lead instrument in a traditional piano trio, Abrahams’s ebbs and flows surface more quickly than Swanton’s bobbing bass lines, but the two establish an equilibrium that builds tension through their sustained high-wire act. How long can they balance atop Buck’s shuddering, percussive backbeat? Has the chord progression reversed itself, or have I? In “Lovelock,” Buck plays crystalline chimes against waves of electronic patterns and a simply gorgeous piano line from Abrahams. In 20 minutes, the trio oscillates between subterranean diversions and brightly lit cadenzas, steadily amplifying (no pun intended) that fourth voice of the studio. “Further” begins almost as a bloody mash-up of the two preceding tracks, with a loping beat that steadily pushes against steadiness itself. Swanton and Buck duel like drunken masters, while Abrahams coasts around their playful rhythms. As with most other albums from The Necks, the joys reveal themselves over many, many listens. And just like those other albums, this one will be on repeat for a long time.

Available on Bandcamp

Three by The Necks

The Necks Three was previously reviewed by Stephen Griffith here.

The Free Jazz Collective 80

Pitchfork 72

More than 30 years into their career, the Australian experimental trio can still make the mundane feel miraculous.