It's a little fucked up to admit, but I very nearly didn't give The Necks the time of day. Knowing nothing about them, I saw their name stamped in the subject line of an email in my inbox and the message barely escaped my trash folder. And, yes, it is entirely due to their name. Many, many, many, in fact, nearly all, "THE" bands are as derivative as ChatGPT generated clickbait. Everyone knows the kind of band I'm referring to. And the absolute worst kind of THE band are the kind who try to get clever by tieng their name into a pun or dropping the THE altogether and going by a past tense verb or exclamatory singular noun instead (eg Stuck, Yuck, Fu... you get the idea- they're still all THE bands, no one is fooled!). Sometimes I feel as though I could write a salient and culturally literate remark on any one of these groups inspired by THE Smiths, or THE Velvet Underground, or THE Pixies, or THE Fall while recovering from a car crash and in a medically induced coma. And the most anxiety-producing aspect of these types of groups is that EVERYONE listens to them, and EVERYONE expects you to have a nuanced opinion of them as a "music guy." It's a dreadful kind of cultural cornering. I feel like a fox chased into a hole in the ground by a pack of bloodhounds whenever I come across one of these groups in my timeline on Twitter or while reading over the lineups for this year's Festival circuit knowing that this will not be the last time I run into them. Knowing, and dreading, the fact that I'm going to have to have an opinion on the next crop of sound-alikes that's been bailed onto a stage in a cordoned-off street near me this summer, and if I'm not excited about the prospect of witnessing and/or discussing these machine-stamped gray-goop golems people are going to treat me like an out-of-touch leper with bad breath. I would give just about anything for The ACTUAL Necks to play one of these hipster hoedowns sponsored by Goose Island or this-or-that neighborhood's chamber of commerce happening near me this year. I'm even tempted to pay for their airfare and lodging myself to see it happen! What triggered me to click and sit with The Neck's latest record was when I realized they were neither a rock or pop band, but a jazz group. And not just any jazz group either, an exceptional one. After listening to their 21st(!) full-length LP Travel, I have to confess that I've found them to be an inexhaustible source of relief in the present hyper-sensational and simply oversaturated media and entertainment landscape. I come away from each meditative listening session feeling as though I'm returning from a spa, or just the right amount of yoga (ie an hour). As I understand, the trio have a reputation for being avant-garde, but to me, it's not their eccentricities or vanguard posturing that cause their sound to fortify my spirit- it's their utter presentness and substantive sense of anchoring. Travel shows the band to be grounded in the absolute, metaphysical phenomenon of being, a cosmic coincidence as profoundly strange in its actuality and magnificent mundanity as would be tears of pure white milk dripping from the pours of the moon, exuded through a channel starlight and dispensed into your palm like a delicate little pearl. Weighty and dextrously graded, the positively predicative emergence of their weaving forms would be akin to a miracle if they weren't so palpable and human. Listening to any track off of Travel is like running your fingers through the threads of a loom and being able to see, as through a divining aperture in your consciousness, the intricate blanket that the strands will knit together to become as well as the family that it will someday comfort and keep warm. Always progressing, becoming, and adapting, its muscles and skeleton maturing in a remarkable, deaccelerated advance towards a paradoxical composure, realized in silhouettes both unrecognizable and consummately conserved from a prior point of impact. A ball of light that becomes more solid the longer you peer into its center, its blinding glare growing more tolerable as its outlines are drawn out to a darker pronouncement of its border. It is like a circle in the sand, an etching to represent the sun, a real and imaginary artifact at the center of its own tiny universe of crab shells, bottle caps, and warn smooth stones, its exalted position and centrality to the ecosystem never dissolved or diminished despite its diminutive, earthen anatomy and dependence on the grace of the elements. Travel will take you places, even when you are standing still as a rocky bluff against the batter of the ocean. I'm glad I punched the ticket and took this ride. It's pushed me farther out into a setting of calm and ruminative contentment than I ever could have anticipated, especially coming from a band performing under a certain cursed determiner.*
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*In case it's not clear, my criticisms of THE bands is a schtick in this review. I've actually loved a great number of rock bands that have used this naming device... I just don't love a lot of them right now.
