The Necks: Vertigo

The Necks have developed a near-mythic status. For a quarter century, they've been building hour-long piano/drums/bass pieces that overflow with the tension of contrasts—beauty versus bedlam, melody versus discord, momentum versus inertia. Live, the Sydney trio do it off the cuff, shaping tiny themes with familiar tools into improvised monoliths. Though the Necks draft more concrete plans for their records, they wield that same sense of wonder when they’re composing. At their best, the group’s albums sound meticulous but feel extemporaneous, like synchronized exhalations from a group whose chemistry suggests rock'n'roll’s best songwriting tandems. Made by just three musicians of ostensibly modest avant-garde-scene means, the Necks’ sets and records possess the same gripping power as a sitcom or documentary that might have cost millions of dollars and dozens of people to craft. The largely acoustic answer to New Zealand’s electric the Dead C, the Necks make miracles of efficiency and magnetism.

Vertigo is the Necks’ 18th album and second for the New York label Northern Spy, the group’s first stable American home. Like many of its predecessors, Vertigo runs as one uninterrupted track, with 44 minutes roughly split between two interwoven movements. It does, however, break from the past by increasing the role of roaring electric guitar (played by drummer Tony Buck) and wafting-and-hiccupping synthesizers and electronic accessories (played by pianist Chris Abrahams). These additions largely shape a drone that fluctuates throughout the album and serves as a springboard for the group’s convulsive repartee. The exact nature of the sustained tone changes: Vertigo begins, for instance, with the growl of Lloyd Swanton’s bowed bass and dense sheets of piano runs. Near the halfway point, though, it’s a high-pitched synthesizer purr, countered by a Rhodes organ whose every chord dissipates into space. Swanton emerges from the impasse with steady, resonant bass sweeps, briefly conjuring the spirit of Tony Conrad’s microtonal masterpieces. And just before track’s end, an organ, bass, and Buck’s scraped drums cohere into a gigantic sigh, so slow and resonant it suggests plate tectonics.

But these interlocking phases are only the undercarriage of Vertigo, the framework upon which the Necks’ usual, brilliant instrumental interplay moves. When Abrahams inlays beautifully ascending melodies inside Buck’s percussive din early on, the effect is magical. And when Buck divides Swanton’s long, bagpipe-like tones with a stuttering, trip-hop rhythm, you listen in anticipation, trying to foretell what might happen next, only to be surprised by the Naked City-style ruptures Buck soon bangs out. This is the Necks at their finest, playing group games of chutes and ladders and delighting in their instrumental ideas like they’re dancing.

But Vertigo does stumble slightly through its rather obvious series of arcs: An opening swell cedes to a comedown that sends the members out into space, only to reconvene a quarter-hour later. This back-and-forth motion defines much of Vertigo and, by record’s end, it gets a bit tedious. And, in part because of the underpinning drone around which the trio works, the Necks are busier and more restless here than in the past, sometimes moving as if trapped inside a pinball machine. The Necks typically make elliptical music, where restraint and suggestion power tension and momentum. Their last album, 2013’s Open, epitomized that. Vertigo, on the other hand, could do more with less—of, say, the tawdry horror-show electronics so prominent near the 12-minute mark or the shock-and-awe noise that populates the back half. The concept of working over and alongside a drone congests the Necks’ customary grace.

The Necks have always confounded easy taxonomy. Their piano-trio semblance has often shoehorned them into jazz circles, though their pronounced lack of swing and structure has infamously confounded critics in those circles. And though there seems to be a natural spot for the Necks in experimental spaces, their presentation—three middle-aged men playing expensive acoustic instruments, often in esteemed concert halls—can make them a strange fit for the underground crowd. Their love of extended pieces and clattering crescendos even suggests a place in post-rock, though their music is often too incidental and illusory for the templates that term implies. With its part-time, eerie John Carpenter glow and sudden noise-rock spasms, Vertigo only renders the Necks as more vexing and unidentifiable. Though the Necks occasionally slip into predictability across this session, Vertigo epitomizes their career-long unpredictability, or their ability to start at one point and arrive somewhere entirely unexpected. Vertigo is a minor Necks record, destined to stand forever in the shadow of the 2013 opus Open. But, after a quarter century, the trio’s explorations still sound as ecstatic as they do limitless. That, at least, is another minor miracle.