Portland blast! Part one: GROUPER

In one week I am going to Portland to see dear friends and celebrate the tenth anniversary of Jackpot Records which is a place that has shaped me as much as any location or even as much as a friend. This is the celebration, the next five days will be my five favorite bands in Portland right now! or at least that is the promise.

Grouper - Untitled

The first thing I love about my favorite songs is when they make a physical demand. Someday I will write about "Press the Trigger" and how it makes me feel like I am being pushed down multiple flights of stairs. The first time I saw High Places I had this very whimsical feeling of swimming underwater and then having a towel wrapped around my shoulders. Anne Briggs makes me still like a child listening to stories. But Liz Harris's Grouper is a really disconcerting collision of physical feelings, and maybe best represented in this untitled song off the debut self titled CDR.

The two immediate collisions look like this: the first is a simple yet careful hopping dance, something you would see in a temple or a field, knees raised and arms up. I can't imagine what the ritual is demanding, but it feels like an ancient demand and one that is constantly fulfilled and just as constantly desired. It's a handsome, unornamented dance, like work-strong hands. The second is much darker, where I'm facing a person whose head is against my chest, steadily thumping against my body as sob after sob shudders out. Both of our arms lay helpless at our sides, occasionally rising in an ineffectual attempt at contact. It's exactly as fucked as it sounds.

The times I've seen Grouper play live have been among my favorite shows in Portland ever, amazing community-minded shows where people are eager, attentive, and brave. Liz Harris, cross legged on the floor with a guitar and a modest tangle of cables and pedals, always took these quiet, respectful audiences on drifting, haunted paths, forcing a silence that I find myself reaching for even now as I remember it. I think this is what reviewers connect with when they compare Grouper to Arvo Pärt which I sort of appreciate but Pärt is contemplative while Grouper is a guide, and not one that takes you by the hand. Even in this song, which is one of the most sonically present of Grouper's compositions, there's a ghoulish cast floating around in there, a spectral hand wrapping its fingers around my collarbone and leading me through the wet cold of fog and the gaping beauty of empty glades.

I think that's what works best about Grouper, is that the songs are undeniably human, the way you would rather not see someone cry but you would feel worse knowing they are on their own crying, like it's better to be there. In high school many of the worst things I did I did in the name of shared experiences, that is to say if one of us had to get cut jumping over a barbed wire fence then we might as well all get cut. It's a good surprise because she never sings words, never approaches language in the way that a listener is used to. There's a way that that could read inhuman, or at the very least intangible, and looking back I used plenty of words like "haunted" and "spectral" as if to distinguish the music from a body. But surpassing that is the immediate physicality of the music, and the human feeling bound up in that weight.

If you check out Grouper's subsequent releases, there's always this cast of fear, or more specifically horror: "Black Blood", "Zombie Skin", "He Knows"; I think that might be a part of what's going on, an uneasy response to an uneasy world. The other part is an unavoidable embrace of that world; a warm, somber, rising dance, a concrete, physical response to everything at once.