Grouper - "Cover the Windows and the Walls"

Grouper - Heart Current (Root Strata 2007)

Grouper - Cover the Windows and the Walls / Root Strata

For me, the birthday happenings ended pretty early last night. The aftermath started in this morning as the evil cough that has been trading barbs with my immune system for the last three days returned. There's no question about it, Justice just was not the kind of music I needed to hear to settle myself down, get a throat lozenge and attempt to sneak in some more sleep. I needed something dreamier. I needed something appropriate for a post-anything aftermath. In the wake of a hacked-up lung, one woman emerged through the haze of the morning sun to save me: Liz Harris. I'd have had it no other way.

Portland resident Harris is the woman behind Grouper, but you may know her better from a Xiu Xiu collaboration called Creepshow. She's also released two albums prior to this one, and on her sophomore effort Way Their Crept she demonstrated a mastery of musical and vocal delay. There's a slight change on Cover the Windows and the Walls, because now she's playing around with pianos and slowly strumming guitars, which form the base of songs like "It Feels Alright." This evolution only works wonders for Grouper, because this album is sheer morning glory for your ears. Like a kid rubbing their eyes to see the sun through the blinds, Cover the Windows and the Walls floats as airless as dust in the light of dawn, enigmatic but never frustratingly opaque.

The songs evoke the pastoral feelings of a roaming countryside the kinds of which Emerson was keen on writing about. Indeed, it's less pastoralism and more transcendentalism that's advertised in this music, borderline ambient but still concrete enough for a listener to detect, um, "hooks." Term used loosely. It's the stuff of dreams, the sounds of REM sleep coming to a close. It's a spiritual state that hovers in on the A-side with the title-track and continues on through to the B-side, which starts off with "Heart Current." This is a special piece of vinyl, understated and at times very distinct ("You Never Came" has the most noticeable guitar pieces). But it is, more than anything else, an individual album.

Maybe Liz Harris is keen on literature and maybe she couldn't care less about it. But the spirit of Emerson's "Nature" is written all over her music, and I mean that in the best possible way. The concluding words of that 1836 manifesto are my best advice to you as you give Grouper a listen. Uncover your windows and walls: "Build, therefore, your own world. As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its great proportions. A correspondent revolution in things will attend the influx of the spirit."