The Man Who Died in His Boat

Grouper’s 2013 debut for Kranky, accompanying a reissue of the earlier release Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill, consisted of outtakes from that album’s sessions and other unreleased numbers. That might sound a little unpromising on the face of it – anything but: such was Liz Harris’s continuing creative flow that The Man Who Died In His Boat became yet another stand-out effort. While many of the songs’ trappings were familiar elements in both her earlier work and the wider world of underground/independent rock – distanced singing, lo-fi murk, shadowy senses of deep sound – Harris’s skill lies in the strength of the results, time and again. Songs like the haunting “Vital,” which became the calling card of the album for many, and the unsettled imagery of the title track show it clearly. Yet at the same time there can just as easily be mysterious gentility as on “Cloud in Places,” at once bright and a bit uneasy, or disorienting arrangements like the overdubbed-and-just-irregular harmonizing on “Cover The Long Way” to keep things constantly engaging, the feeling of revealing one hidden treasure after another.