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Avg: 4.0 (210 ratings)
- Date Released: June 10, 2008
- Genre: Electronic
- Style: Electronic Ambient
- Label: Type / Morr Music GBR
A hazy, opaquely beautiful album of sighs and drones
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We Say...
When musicians rely heavily on reverb, it usually ends up coming off one of two ways: as a mask to hide their own musical shortcomings or a controlled aesthetic choice that changes the ordinary into something spectacular. Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill is a remarkable example of the latter. Grouper albums typically come cloaked in a certain amount of transformative ugliness: elegance and production clarity are sacrificed to create a deliberately ethereal voice. With each release under her Grouper moniker, Liz Harris has expanded her range as both a singer/songwriter and a sound artist. With Dragging, conventional approaches — vocal melodies, traditional instrumentation — that were previously and consciously submerged have been allowed to surface.
Which goes a long way to explain why Dragging is the most focused and accessible Grouper outing to date. The major difference is simple: guitar and vocals, while still draped in effects, are clearer and more upfront. Harris’s new, less opaque methods (most successful on "Heavy Water / I'd Rather Be Sleeping") let the perfect amount of light shine through the trees. There is a dark forest of sound here, but not much to be afraid of. These breathy, ghostly incantations over repetitive acoustic strumming provide a secure map of the terrain with mostly coherent lyrics and distinguishable song structures, while the remaining songs veer off course just enough to keep things interesting. The title track is swaddled in delay and detuned electric guitar, and on "Wind and Snow" the composition drifts into an almost complete wash of feedback and soft focus. Start-to-finish, Dragging a Dead Deer manages to dodge any kind of simple classification: Dark folk? Ambient? Experimental? Yes, no and always — in the best possible way. -
They Say...
Liz Harris' first two Grouper albums, Way Their Crept and Wide, consisted mostly of layers of her pristine vocals blanketed in drones, reverb, and distortion until they blurred into a blissful, and sometimes eerie, haze. That haze lifts ever so slightly on Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill, letting more melody, more structured songs, and even a few phrases emerge from the ether. Fragile acoustic and electric guitars and the occasional keyboard also bring this album more down to earth than Grouper's earlier work, but the music never feels stifled or limited -- if anything, the added structure lets these songs take flight and reach peaks of beauty that Wide and Way Their Crept only glimpsed. Harris' voice is especially spine-tingling on "Stuck," where her gorgeous harmonies only need gentle strumming to support their ebb and flow. Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill's soft, intricate layers have their roots in late-'80s/early-'90s dream pop (and the work of the Cocteau Twins and early His Name Is Alive in particular -- Home Is in Your Head could be this album's great-great-grandmother), but Grouper's take is looser and more organic; there's a reason many of the song titles feature nature imagery ("Heavy Water/I'd Rather Be Sleeping," "Traveling Through a Sea"). Dragging a Dead Deer also shows more musical range than Harris' previous work: "Disengaged," which introduces the album with blasts of static that suggest wind and waves, and the wistful "Invisible" fall closest to Wide and Way Their Crept's drifting approach, while "Fishing Bird (Empty Jutted in the Evening Breeze)" and "A Cover Over" boast distinct verses and choruses as well as the rest of the album's otherworldly atmosphere. This is also Grouper's most emotionally wide-ranging work, covering the electric lullaby "When We Fall" to the slightly ominous shimmer of the title track. Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill offers moments that are just as memorable as the entire album, and all of them are subtly, but stunningly, beautiful.
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| 01. |  |
Disengaged |
4:16 |
|
| 02. | |
Heavy Water/I'd Rather Be Sleeping |
2:53 |
|
| 03. | |
Stuck |
5:59 |
|
| 04. | |
When We Fall |
2:07 |
|
| 05. | |
Traveling Through A Sea |
4:23 |
|
| 06. | |
Fishing Bird (Empty Gutted In The Evening Breeze) |
3:51 |
|
| 07. | |
Invisible |
3:55 |
|
| 08. | |
I'm Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill |
2:21 |
|
| 09. | |
A Cover Over |
2:48 |
|
| 10. | |
Wind And Snow |
4:30 |
|
| 11. | |
Tidal Wave |
5:35 |
|
| 12. | |
We've All Gone To Sleep |
3:03 |
|
12 Total Tracks, 45:41 Total Length
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Credits
- Timothy Stollenwerk - Mastering
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