In his NYT Magazine article, Dyer writes that unlike most jazz bands, no one in The Necks ever solos, which is a fair way to look at it. When piping organ flourishes and the half-sensed specter of a rumba (!) rhythm arrive about halfway through the track’s 20 minutes, it’s like an early spring flower rocketing into bloom, after a winter that seemed to last forever but then ended in a heartbeat. You can hear the nowness of it from the get-go, in Lloyd Stanton’s supple yet assertive double-bass figure that provides the backbone for the opening track, “Signal.” Stanton’s buttery thrum strongly recalls ECM legend Dave Holland’s, but whereas Holland often made use of a forceful musician like guitarist John Abercrombie or saxophonist Sam Rivers to take his power and run with it, here pianist Chris Abrahams goes in the opposite direction, playing long, delicate modal lines that add shade but little color, like Keith Jarrett at his most hesitantly introspective. Travel is of the latter sort, with the added immediacy of being a nearly live recording based on the band’s studio warmup jams, with little in the way of polishing or overdubs. Forty-five or so years ago, critics would have dealt with this sort of omnivorous genre-hopping by labeling The Necks “fusion,” and, while that tag has since acquired white-wine-funk connotations that don’t apply here, it is, in this listener’s opinion, a more apt description of The Necks’ project.īroadly speaking, Necks albums can be broken down into two different types: single hour-long tracks that leave you boggling at how the band gets from point A to whatever esoteric letters lie far beyond the Z of the known alphabet and groupings of three or four 15-20-minute tracks, in which the band sets up a defined framework and proceeds to painstakingly fill in the canvas. The press has made much of The Necks being “uncategorizable” - they use a minimal jazz setup of piano/organ, bass and drums to improvise patient, subtly shifting pieces that reward close listening, but that can also groove, even swing, and 2018’s Body proved that, with the judicious addition of a little guitar (as a treat), the band could summon a delectably toe-tapping drone along the lines of more rock-oriented fellow travelers like Stereolab.
And yet, after all that, The Necks still seem like they’re a cult band in search of a larger following. Two excellent albums, both on Northern Spy, followed, along with two collaborations with the techno group Underworld. In 2017, the band’s profile got a further boost in two very different quarters when Stephen O’Malley of drone titans Sunn O))) released the intricately spiky Fold on his Ideologic Organ label, and novelist and critic Geoff Dyer wrote a glowing piece about them for The New York Times Magazine.
Travel is the 19th studio album, give or take, by The Necks, an Australian instrumental trio whose first album dropped in 1986 - but few besides the most learned stateside heads had heard of them before 2013, when the estimable Brooklyn label Northern Spy brought their album spacious, unusually elegiac Open to these shores.
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