Bleed

Bleed is the 23rd studio album from Australian piano trio the Necks. It follows 2023s Travel and is their second offering on the venerable Northern Spy label. The trio of pianist Chris Abrahams, bassist Lloyd Swanton, and drummer Tony Buck improvised and recorded Bleed as a single, 42-minute composition on the theme of stillness: its language, meaning, presence, and disruptions. Abrahams introduces the work with sustained, single piano notes in the middle and lower register for several minutes. Buck supports them after five minutes with sheeny cymbal washes, reverbed treated bass and kickdrum notes, bells, and chime sounds. They merge seemingly randomly, though Abrahams is offering an atonal base, complete with lower-register drones. At six minutes, he plays his first piano chord, but it is isolated behind Bucks rolling snare that fades as electronics meld with the piano. While the piano offers sparse, detached repetition, bass and drums follow no other logic than trying to answer the question, "what is stillness?" The music investigates this and other queries on the theme. During their restraint over the first 15 minutes, the listener can hear tonal and textural tensions offering utterance to the entity being created. After the intro, the trio investigate the very sounds they just birthed with equanimity and consensus. Abstraction, dissonance, ambience, and limpid harmonics meet at the 13-minute mark and pursue a different musical direction as electronics, droning bass, and sparse percussion become painterly, shifting details and responses as the music changes in shape, form, and dynamic. Five minutes later, Swantons guitar slips in unobtrusively, adding an assonant harmonic frame atop rolling tom-toms and kickdrums as Abrahams plays a circular pattern on synth. The unhurried abstraction aurally begs for release at about the halfway mark, yet the Necks strip it down further, offering a small series of changes amid imposing silence and dynamic restraint. Abrahams elides a pattern in the upper register as Swanton answers with single droning notes; Buck caresses various percussion instruments or lays out altogether. The bassist offers an arco drone interspersed with single notes. The piano is played, sampled, and treated from the bottom end. It all becomes a foundation for harmonic interjections with rumbling cymbals. That sense of menace eventually gives way to organ, chimes, and abstract tensions. They gradually present an exoskeleton of a melody with lithe electronics, circular dynamics, and a breezy tonal palette that ushers in silence. Ultimately, Bleed is the Necks most formless, abstract, and focused album, one that that points toward a brave new direction. ~ Thom Jurek