Grouper– The Man Who Died In His Boat (Kranky Records)
Anybody with a history of buying music could rightly be wary of the phenomenon of long-unreleased companion recordings that might see the light of day subsequent to the success of some artist's better-loved work. Though they're usually posited as some sort of buried treasure, they're more often than not a cash-grab and, while die-hard fans might rejoice, it's often readily apparent why they had not been released in the first place. These preconceptions aren't always accurate, however, and in some instances (rare though they may be) an artist's unearthed material can shed light on their creative development and facilitate a more nuanced look at their larger body of work.
Since 2005, Liz Harris has been releasing albums as Grouper, each a mass of sparse guitar strumming and hushed vocals overlayed with layers of ambient sound and residual waves of echo. Her heightened degree of popularity and critical acclaim came with 2008's Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill, an album that honed the elements from which her music was comprised into something considerably more accessible, while not sacrificing the ethereal and the experimental tendencies of her earlier work. Concurrent to that, Harris also recorded the material present on The Man Who Died In His Boat, an album's worth of material that represents the yin to its successful predecessor's yang.
While The Man Who Died In His Boat doesn't really vary appreciably from other Grouper releases, it does represent a point in Harris' artistic development that's not only interesting for the light it shines on the evolution of her work, but as enjoyable as any of her previous albums. The familiar elements - the distant folksy quality of the songwriting, the manner in which spacey textural elements and echo effects act as instrumentation to the same extent as the guitar and vocals – are in place. But the album still manages to incorporate traces of the rough, unfocused quality of the earliest Grouper work into the more polished material that would characterize later albums. While songs like “Living Room” rival Dragging... songs like “I'd Rather Be Sleeping” for the distinction of being the closest Harris comes to a conventional pop song, pieces like “Vanishing Point” are raw and aimless sketches of aleatoric keyboard passages, sketch-like enough that they can prove an almost uncomfortable listen, as if taking it in is somehow a voyeuristic look at the earliest and most vulnerable stages of an artist at work.
This isn't to suggest that this album runs a particularly wide sonic gamut – if a chromatic metaphor were to be employed, it's another of Harris's exercises in grey shading – but the subtle shifts in mood and timbre are more than enough to render the album as compelling as any of Grouper's best albums. Its distant, decaying quality renders it equally inviting and off-putting, somewhere between dreamlike and nightmarish, without settling comfortably in either extreme. Ultimately, though, the quality of The Man Who Died... is able to render unimportant whether the album was initially intended for release or whether it was simply a collection of demo recordings. Its quality acts as a testament to the consistency of Harris' work and, regardless of the circumstances under which it was brought to light, highlights how solid an entry it is into the Grouper canon.