They, not Montgomery, are the clear stars here.Īll Songs Considered Roy Montgomery's Divine Distortion Makes 'Landfall' With Grouper's Liz Harrisīut he tugs at the corners of his guitar track and their vocals, gently pushing them against one another until the boundary between the singer's lead role and the guitar's supporting status blur. 1," as it is of Harris, whose vocals stretch across "Landfall" like a century's accretion of spider webs. This is as true of Von Schleicher, whose surprisingly arching torment suggests drum-less doom-metal during "Outsider Love Ballad No. He first foregrounds every singer, so that their voices are pushed squarely into the spotlight.
But Montgomery sidesteps that pitfall with a solution that seems paradoxical.
If this sounds like an invitation to chaos, where each track feels isolated and concerned more with each singer's signature than with a unified project, it is. Still, one by one, they become Montgomery's voice and foil. Brooklyn's Katie Von Schleicher favors a tempestuous brand of twisted pop, while the mesmeric tunes of New Zealand sisters Purple Pilgrims stare forever into the middle distance. Where Julianna Barwick builds cathedral-like mirages from her wondrous intonations, She Keeps Bees' Jessica Larrabee borders on blues singer status, like Cat Power telling The Black Keys to step to the back of the stage. Where Haley Fohr of Circuit des Yeux tends to command songs with stentorian bravado, Grouper's Liz Harris peeks from around the edges of her music only long enough to remind us that there is a human behind her distant though intimate beauties. The seven singers of Suffuse - all women, offering words he largely wrote as he plays guitar - are an artistically diverse lot. He asked other singers to interpret his words, an idea that morphed into the six entirely new songs of Suffuse, with the first half written entirely by Montgomery and the back half penned by their respective singers. On his latest album, Montgomery tries a novel disappearing act that works. Pushed against the feathery delicacy of his padded guitar pieces, his burly tone could indeed be jarring. He sang on the first set, R: Tropic of Anodyne, despite being his voice's own worst critic (having once said of his singing, "It's lazy. In 2016, after a decade-plus absence, Montgomery released RMHQ, a four-LP set where each album applied a specific approach to a distinct mood.
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