For an artist renowned for her droning atmospherics and hushed vocals, Liz Harris is rarely quiet or inactive. Throughout the past decade, she has offered up a stellar array of albums under the moniker Grouper, as well as collaborations with artists such as Tiny Vipers and Lawrence English. Despite the constant output, her work is reliably breathtaking. Even last year’s collection of outtakes The Man Who Died in His Boat has more coherence and depth than most artists manage on proper new releases.
Grouper began to receive widespread attention following her acclaimed 2008 LP Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill. As its name implies, the tracks were almost unbearably heavy, despite being primarily constructed of acoustic strumming and whispered, unintelligible lyrics.
On Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill Harris seemingly found love to be overwhelming and suffocating. “How long can you hold your breath?” she asked on “Fishing Bird,” while on “Heavy Water” she sighed “love is enormous, it’s lifting me up / I’d rather be sleeping.”
Grouper’s upcoming LP Ruins, out October 31 on Kranky, sees the artist grappling with the remains of a failed relationship. Whereas she once understood love to be agonizing, she now finds herself lost in its wake. “I hear you calling and I want to go run straight into the valleys of your arms and disappear there,” begins “Holding.” Lovelorn is a new look for Grouper.
And yet, for all their aching romanticism, these are less love songs than they are ghost stories. Each track is riddled with uncertainties and losses: “Every time I see you, I have to pretend I don’t,” “Our love is nothing,” “I see you sort of fading.” But Grouper hasn’t gone soft, and this is a far cry from weepy Adele-esque power balladry. Violence lurks in the corners of these songs, depicting images such as “a needle drawing pictures in the blood.”
Written for the piano and recorded on a portable 4-track, Ruins marks more than just a lyrical departure from Grouper’s earlier drone-based work. There’s an eerie stillness, as the melodies hover around Harris’ quiet musings. She stated in her press release that most of the album was recorded in a landscape defined by “the ruins of several old estates and a small village.” Whereas this environment was once populated and brimming with life, it is now forgotten and left to decay. Similarly, Ruins explores the impermanence and inevitable decay of love.
All eight tracks move glacially, but deliberately. Opener “Made of Metal” suggests a grand entrance is imminent, with distant percussion set against ominous field recordings. It’s quite disorienting, then, when the track collides into “Clearing,” a subdued elegy. The juxtaposition of these two songs is so jarring that it almost feels accidental, and likely only makes sense to Harris herself. Later on, “Holding” spends nearly a minute stuttering before finding its melody, as if the emotions it evokes are too painful to express.
While Ruins is singular in sound and vision, it calls to mind Oupa’s overlooked 2011 gem Forget. In both cases, it’s easy to imagine the songwriter sitting in a dark room, writing for someone they know will never listen. These are stark, skeletal, bruised recordings that say much with little.
Ruins is an album to obsess over. You’ll find yourself up at 2am, trying to transcribe its muttered lyrics. You’ll begin to anticipate the moments when Harris’ voice trails off to little more than a sigh, leaving her words hollow and exhausted. You’ll get swept up in the ambient haze of album closer “Made of Air” and not realize that 11 minutes have passed since it began.
In one of his love poems, E. E. Cummings wrote “my love is building a building around you…” Grouper sings from the rubble when the building collapses.
Rating: 4.5/5