Genre: Ambient/ShoegazeInfo (Roy Montgomery)
Info (Grouper)
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Here's a new split with one of my favorites, Portland's very own Grouper and New Zealand guitarist Roy Montgomery. The Roy Montgomery side starts the split with one 18 minute track of ambient guitar that makes you feel like you're going through a journey (in a good way), it's worth a listen, but in my opinion comes nowhere close to what Grouper has to offer on this split. Then again I may be a bit biased given I have this split and am posting it solely for the Grouper material, and the fact that Grouper is one of my favorite bands.
The first Grouper track "Hollow Press" starts off with windy white noise, then about half way through faint keys and Liz Harris' dreamy vocals enter. It then flows seamlessly into the next song "Vessel". This is a much more stripped down Grouper than we're used to hearing. Instead of dreamy acoustic guitar, or more ambiance as heard in earlier albums, we have instead a single, reverb drenched Wurlitzer keyboard, and voice. "Hold The Way" follows up with the same instrumentation as before, and once again flows seamlessly into the last track "Pulse". Keeping the same theme as "Hold The Way", it eventually is drowned out in windy white noise.
