The Necks ~ Bleed

Bleed begins with just a piano, four notes, and a lot of silence. Each note left to run its natural course. Their decay lingering, before being repeated, for the first few drawn out minutes of the record. When individual keys are given that degree of spaciousness it feels significant because it’s rare. It’s a powerful opening statement.

The Australian trio The Necks, comprised of Chris Abrahams, Tony Buck, and Lloyd Swanton, regularly explore the themes present on Bleed—space, decay, and repetition—through minimalist, improvisational work often oriented around the keyboard.

And it is the keyboard that holds the spotlight, even its absence, on Bleed. Nearly ten minutes into the record a guitar replaces the keyboard for a time. After that a marimba-like instrument and a bass trade short, repeated motifs before the guitar returns and finally the piano. When the keys return its to play a lilting, mostly ascending phrase, that repeats with slight variations and which, again, pauses for periods of stillness. The melody come as a surprise. It’s song-like quality a dramatic departure from the sparseness of the previous twenty minutes. It’s hard to know what to make of the choppy bass that begins to accompany it. Just as it’s hard to know what to make of its disappearance. There’s a sense of mystery that accompanies the journey of Bleed. It’s a record that manages to feel both small and massive at once. A testament to the fullness of quiet.  

Light percussion enters at times, chimes, a cymbal, a snare drum. At some points on the record there is a gentle hum droning along beneath it all, but electricity seems to be at a minimum on much of the album. Only the faintest sense of distortion or reverb is sensible on the edges of these instruments’ sounds and even when it is apparent, such as on the distant, deep rumble of keys near the thirty minute mark, the timbre of the acoustic instruments still surface. Towards the end there is a bit more synthesis; a mysterious repetitive whirring and some other resonant electronics that persist until nearly the end, but the true stars of the record are elsewhere.

There’s not a massive sense of waiting on Bleed, as one might expect in slow, spacious music like this. The piece’s conclusion does reveal another dimension to the sounds that we have been hearing over the last forty minutes as gentle repeated chords on the piano, met with the occasional thrum of bass, and strum of guitar, reemerge forcefully and beautifully. But the experience of Bleed is, as the best minimalist music, strikingly oriented around the present.  It is music that asks, and allows, the listener the opportunity to attend closely to not just sound but it’s whole life cycle. The natural decay of acoustic sound is a quality most music takes for granted or tries to deny. The Necks’ improvisations implicitly argue for the significance of each and every sound and Bleed supports that contention with a powerful, elegant argument. (Jennifer Smart)