Type
2008
Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill
About This Album
Liz Harris' first two Grouper albums, Way Their Crept and Wide, consisted mostly of layers of her pristine vocals blanketed in drones, reverb, and distortion until they blurred into a blissful, and sometimes eerie, haze. That haze lifts ever so slightly on Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill, letting more melody, more structured songs, and even a few phrases emerge from the ether. Fragile acoustic and electric guitars and the occasional keyboard also bring this album more down to earth than Grouper's earlier work, but the music never feels stifled or limited -- if anything, the added structure lets these songs take flight and reach peaks of beauty that Wide and Way Their Crept only glimpsed. Harris' voice is especially spine-tingling on "Stuck," where her gorgeous harmonies only need gentle strumming to support their ebb and flow. Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill's soft, intricate layers have their roots in late-'80s/early-'90s dream pop (and the work of the Cocteau Twins and early His Name Is Alive in particular -- Home Is in Your Head could be this album's great-great-grandmother), but Grouper's take is looser and more organic; there's a reason many of the song titles feature nature imagery ("Heavy Water/I'd Rather Be Sleeping," "Traveling Through a Sea").
Track List (try tracks 2,4,6,7 and 9)

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