David Grubbs, Creep Mission
Blue Chopsticks BC29 LP/CD
http://www.dragcity.com/products/creep-mission
If “mission creep” refers to a long-haul fatigue cited with increasingly regularity in the present political moment, David Grubbs imagines “creep mission” to be a talismanic utterance in the effort to turn this ship around.
Creep Mission is an album of instrumental compositions with Grubbs’s effortlessly recombinant electric guitar at its core, and its m.o. is to go both deep and wide. The album goes deep in the sense that the guitar becomes the relentless, meditative focus of these songs without words, and it goes wide in that these pieces utilize a discontinuous set of arrangements that make the most out of an extraordinary group of musicians convened for the mission at hand.
Drummer and most simpatico sparring partner Eli Keszler picks up where his brilliant contributions to Grubbs’s 2016 Prismrose left off; trumpeter Nate Wooley defies you to identify his range of sounds as coming from a single player; and Jan St. Werner (Mouse on Mars, Lithops) can hardly contain his joy in transforming the proceedings into electro-prismatic splinters. For his part, Grubbs’s guitar playing has never before so confidently mangled commonsensical distinctions between composed and improvised music.
The album’s opener, “Slylight,” wends its way through a sequence of instrumental combinations in a manner redolent of Gastr del Sol’s Camoufleur. Before the album has concluded with the melancholy country raga of “The C in Certain,” waystations between have assumed the character of sludge-rock power trio (“Creep Mission,” “Return of the Creep”), pointillistic electroacoustic improv (“Jeremiadaic”), and bejeweled nylon-string guitar miniatures (“The Bonapartes of Baltimore,” “Jack Dracula in a Bar”).
David Grubbs’s solo albums often have a “the band has left the building” quality of dramatic left turns in the final act; on Creep Mission, peripatetic playing is basic strategy.
Related Blue Chopsticks titles:
BC2 David Grubbs & Mats Gustafsson, Apertura
BC5 David Grubbs, The Coxcomb / Avocado Orange
BC9 David Grubbs, Act Five, Scene One
BC11 David Grubbs & Mats Gustafsson, Off-Road
BC17 David Grubbs & Susan Howe, Souls of the Labadie Tract
BC20 David Grubbs, Hybrid Songbox.4
BC21 Belfi / Grubbs / Pilia, Onrushing Cloud
BC22 Susan Howe & David Grubbs, Frolic Architecture
BC23 Wingdale Community Singers, Night, Sleep, Death
BC24 David Grubbs, Borough of Broken Umbrellas
BC25 Belfi / Grubbs / Pilia, Dust & Mirrors
BC27 Susan Howe & David Grubbs, WOODSLIPPERCOUNTERCLATTER
BC28 David Grubbs, Prismrose
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