No-Neck Blues Band Clomeim

If the phrase “avant-garde perennial” seems antithetical on its own, it appears even more so when applied to the No-Neck Blues Band. The stridently un-knowable Harlem unit is hostile to the very constancy that is intrinsic to a notion of legacy, yet the group has managed to maintain a distinctive space, before and after the “Weird America” ballyhoo, as a corner stone of stateside experimentalism.

“Weird” seems to be a wholly inadequate marker for the NNCK sound.  The term connotes a comparatively normal other, and NNCK saunters to the tune of an entirely other other.  The group embodies a sense of curiosity to which there are few readily perceivable referents, and their sound is as difficult to describe as it is unmistakably their own. 

Still, there are certain aspects that I will cautiously regard as archetypal NNCK: a premeditated percussive commotion, as if a myriad of sticks was left to tumble down long flights, the logic of the steps skirmishing with the haplessness of the fall; a sense of anxious, deliberate tinkering on the six string, re-remembering the guitar as a rusted rhythmic tool; vocalism as incantation, with detached, wordless voices and searing brass banshees playing ethereal anchor to the mutant humanism of the total sound; a sense of freedom and formlessness as the creative summit, one safeguarded by a shroud of anonymity, or, better yet, facelessness.  

This is an admittedly impressionistic catalogue and its purpose is to underscore how Clomeim, the group’s first widely distributed studio recording since 2006’s Embryo collaboration EMBRYONNCK, is yet another departure for a sound that resists stasis, a sound that is perpetually departing. Touted in its unusually cogent press release as a “rare hybrid (of) a rock exterior with a cryptic, experimental core,” Clomeim is certainly NNCK’s most rock-oriented record, but this distinction is a dubious one.  NNCK are not merely content with occupying simple, singular modes, and even the moments on Clomeim when they appear to flirt with cohesive stylistic intuitions, the approach remains one of refracting and disassembling.

Clomeim’s second track and first extended exercise, titled The Coach House, is introduced by a bee hive string buzz, a brief two-note piano figure, and a seemingly wordless female moan, with each of these elements overlapping but maintaining their individual space, rather than appearing compressed in dissonance.  Such bold, albeit brief, instances of (relatively) linear composition give the impression of conventional song that NNCK seems comfortable with embracing on Clomiem. The ensuing instrumental workout follows suit: here the No-Neck Blues Band actually sound bluesy, albeit a menaced, ghostly Jackie-O Motherfucker kind of bluesy.  The palpable rock feel of this track is largely a product of its percussion: the characteristic NNCK tumult is harnessed by syncopation and performed on what sounds like a standard kit, a rarity for a group with that is partial to homemade and (mis)treated instruments.  Meanwhile, finite nuances like repeated guitar fills and a mandolin miming the opening piano figure instigate major shifts in tone and color, giving lie to the myth that these cats just join hands, drop tabs, and push record. Quite to the contrary, the music here and throughout is evidently the spawn of an improv/craft dialectic, the energy of spontaneity and the marvel of sound sculpture produce Clomeim’s core ebb and flow.

Coach House is one of a handful of tracks on Clomeim to employ a noticeably rock-oriented guitar and drum approach, the apex being the 14 minute, penultimate La Promesse Miruco, the group’s most infectious channeling yet of the Krautrock spirit.  Walking Wind and Again are also curiously coherent tracks, with percussion pared down to foreground guitar work and ambient texture: Wind juxtaposes plodding, low register electric guitar thumps with uncharacteristically melodic acoustic lines; the electric noodles on Again might be at home with neck-beard Bonnaroo set if they weren’t being molested with knife-edge synths, scratched strings, and clinging symbols.

But for every lucid moment on Clomeim, for each instance of somewhat sensible sound, there is a matching moan of transcendental turmoil: Ministry of Voices immediately undercuts the more comfortable turf of Coach House with warpath sax and a grizzly inhuman bawl, its drum fills shuddering towards a hammer of the gods payoff that never quite calcifies; Ialas Salandiw and Make Love form the album’s hushed middle, with spell cast chimes, scrambled electronics, disfigured strings, and whispered vocals building towards a skeletal rhythmic coda; by the end of Salai Widnalas, the song’s slowly unfolding elements appear as a single demon scream, the album’s most arresting moment.  

If we are going to dub Clomeim as the No-Neck Blues Band’s most accessible record, as the most appropriate entry point for the uninitiated into their extraordinary body of work, we should be careful to remember that for NNCK accessibility is very much a relative value.  This is a group for whom music is agitated, informal exploration, for whom the comfort zone is alien territory.  That said, Clomeim, a dense, multifaceted sound-work that captures NNCK in prime, eclectic splendor, is more inviting that anything I have heard from the group: there is, quite simply, so much to hear on Clomeim, and where previous NNCK releases have tested tolerance, this one seems to beckon the rediscovery of viscerally alluring sound that the group enacts in its making.