Album Review: Bleed by The Necks

Unstaunched attention span The Necks have nothing to prove to anyone at this point, which is all the explanation you need for why their latest record Bleed exists in the form it does. Their central enterprise is well-charted - a jazz trio churning a single prismatic nugget through their keys-bass-drums matrix until an album's worth of improv has materialised, evolved, and made you question everything you thought you knew about capital-M minimalism - and it's withstood umpteen minor permutations. Admirers of the group's classic one-song, one-album, one-hour formula have welcomed bipartite structures and extra hands into the studio (Aquatic), braced themselves as drummer Tony Buck took leave from the kit to chip and scrape away on his guitar (Chemist), and long since accepted that a Necks record can contain as many tracks as it pleases so long as each treats the thought of a ten-minute runtime as a skimpy baseline (Unfold).

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One of the main challenges for any group of improvising musicians is to figure out ways to push forward without repeating yourself. One would imagine this is especially true for the legendary Australian trio The Necks, both because they specialise in ultra minimal longform improvised soundscapes, and because they've been pursuing these sounds for more than thirty-five years now. Miraculously, it still feels as though each album from The Necks is a world of its own, from the tangled jungle of 1999's Hanging Gardens to the droning death rattle of 2015's Vertigo.

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