Amongst other qualities, the music of Australia’s The Necks is hypnotic and always evolving. That is, mesmerizing in the moment and never static over the span of a single long improvised piece or across a nearly four-decade stretch of productivity. Their twentieth studio album Disquiet, available October 10 through Northern Spy, is an appropriately expansive affair, featuring four tracks on three compact discs with durations ranging from 26 to 74 minutes. Massively scaled yet engrossing, The Necks’ brilliance is singular as it journeys once again to unexpected heights.
Disquiet clocks in at 3 hours, nine minutes, 27 seconds, making it roughly one minute longer than Magnolia, Paul Thomas Anderson’s feature film released in 1999. Disquiet is roughly four minutes longer than Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon but eight minutes shorter than Kubrick’s Spartacus. These comparisons aren’t particularly significant except to denote the coexistence of the epic and the engaging.
But why choose film rather than music for the purposes of illuminating similarities? Indeed, there are numerous recordings that are of comparable length or even considerably longer than Disquiet. One reason is to acknowledge the reality of difference as it applies to The Necks, whose music has often been categorized as jazz but sounds like no other working group in the wide-ranging history of the form, even as it flows from the well-trodden ground of the piano trio model.
That’s Chris Abrahams on keys of various types, Lloyd Swanton on basses electric and acoustic, and Tony Buck on drums and percussion. They have welcomed guests on a handful of recordings but more often assume the roles of multi-instrumentalists, frequently by adding electronics into the weave.
There are other reasons to bring film into the discussion. Sex, the debut recording by The Necks, released in 1989, offered a solitary 56-minute long track. It was released only on compact disc, which allowed for the music to be heard uninterrupted. CD has remained the only physical release format for Sex across a handful of reissues since.
Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, a three hour 26-minute film, was released without an intermission in 2023. The reason should be clear; to interrupt the narrative momentum is to irrevocably compromise the experience (Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, released in 2024, is one of the few recent cinematic epics with a built-in intermission). Likewise, to break up “Sex” onto two sides of vinyl or cassette would’ve greatly diminished (if not destroyed) the effect of the music.
Concessions are often wise and sometimes a necessity. This is indisputable historically, as groups that made their bones on the bandstand, from Appalachian string bands to Harlem-based jazz orchestras truncated songs meant to satisfy a boisterous room in performance and therefore thriving with indeterminant lengths down to durations that could fit into the grooves of a 78rpm disc.
Technology has since allowed for variation and compromise. This applies to The Necks, who have released vinyl when it suits them. Mindset (2011), Vertigo (2015), Travel (2023) and Bleed (2024) are four examples. This time out, it’s CD and digital only, although Disquiet’s discs are unnumbered, allowing listeners to choose their own sequence, either with permanence or shifting as the mood hits them.
Perhaps the booming throb thunder of the 74-minute “Ghost Net” goes first, followed by the relatively slim blend of sustained tones and cyclical intensities that shape the 26-minute “Causeway” second. This would leave the jazzier atmosphere of the 32-minute “Warm Running Sunlight” and the more classically Minimalist and prog-kissed 57-minute “Rapid Eye Movement” for the back half. However it’s absorbed, Disquiet is the third consecutive masterpiece in as many years for The Necks.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
