Review Summary: haunt me. haunt me. do it again.
Liz Harris made her name with an album called
Dragging a Dead Dear Up a Hill, which should go some way to describe the exact amount of cheerfulness in her music. That is to say, not much.
Dragging... saw Liz pair her soft, haunting vocals with reverberating washes of ambiance. If it were visual art it would be a pastel portrait of a dead family pet: gentle but with a very obvious wash of sadness.
Ruins is mostly piano based, but otherwise much the same. Recorded during a residency in Aljezur, Portugal, Liz decided to write the album after stumbling on a solitary upright piano in an otherwise empty room. More than anything else,
Ruins is a reaction to the place she was in. In her own words 'The album is a document. A nod to the daily walk. Failed structures. Living in the remains of love... I hope the album bears some resemblance to the place I was in.'
The melancholy goes without saying, it has been a key part of Liz's music since she first recorded as Grouper in 2006, but the resignation and detachment throughout Ruins hits hard. Her vocals, though sweet, stay very calm: leaving the piano to add the real emotional heft. This has the result of making album stand-out 'Lighthouse' crushingly depressing as she quietly crones over the delicate, repeating tones in the background, before playing out in silence. It is almost as if Liz is haunting her own music.
The portable 4-track recorder used to capture most of
Ruins adds to the feeling of Liz being somehow diaphanous. Every piano chord leads to a deep, echoing boom of reverb, and as all the notes collect into a general haze Liz's voice gets carried off as well. She becomes inseparable from the environment she tries to record, when her voice is used at all. Ruins carries on the Grouper tradition that any vocals are only as important as the music around them: this is as far away from sing-along songs as you can possibly get.
Ruins is simple - noticeably simple, almost proudly simple - but any attempt my mind can make to form this into a negative struggles to avoid the fact it is also bloody beautiful. The simplicity makes the album lonely and it makes the album precious, like a snow globe scene of Liz stuck with the lonely piano in the centre, trying to make sense of the surrounding storm.
