Albums by this artist

Drive By (2003)

Necks

Drive By

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» PIERO SCARUFFI | STAFF WRITER

Necks Drive By Morphius, 2003 RiYL: Brian Eno, Terry Riley, Manuel Gottsching

By 2003, the three members of Australia's unclassifiable Necks were playing together only a couple of times a year. But the group is still releasing new music, as borne out by Drive By, yet another one hour-long slowly-unfolding chamber piece that relies on both minimalist repetition and jazz improvisation for its dreamy ambience and fluent dynamics.

If 2002's Hanging Gardens was lively and virulent, and the previous year's Aether was pure understated bliss, Drive By can be said to be the perfect encounter of Miles Davis, Terry Riley and Brian Eno. With a stronger sense of the groove than its predecessor (and a touch of African polyrhythm), the amalgam of Tony Buck's tribal drums, Lloyd Swanton's repetitive bass lines and Chris Abrahams' wavering piano meditations is a classic of casual conversation.

It almost sounds like the counterpart to Soft Machine's sixth album, which, starting from similar premises, accomplished much more austere and geometric structures. The keyboards are absolute protagonists, yielding the totality of the piece's diversity, with occasional peaks of pathos. As usual, the meaning is as cryptic as a summer breeze.

Halfway into the track (at 27 minutes), children are heard playing in the background, and the delicate timbres of the piano seem to engage in some kind of counterpoint (while a distorted organ whines on top of it); and at 48 minutes the music is invaded by a loud buzzing sound, as of thousands of bees, and other animal-sounding noises, while the tempo gets funkier, until the music dissolves and only chirping birds are left.

The only drawback compared with its predecessor is that somehow the textures do not achieve the same sense of otherworldiness. The process is, in a sense, too obvious for the spectator to be hypnotized by the clockwork.

PIERO SCARUFFI | Piero Scaruffi runs the exhaustive music database Scaruffi.com. A native of Italy, he has also been praised for his work on the General Theory of Relativity, formal theories of the mind, and artificial intelligence. And no, we aren't making that up.