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Listening back to Camoufleur, Gastr Del Sol’s fifth and final studio album, the most striking thing is how fresh it still sounds a quarter of a century later. The range of ideas on show is almost obscene, and the way it incorporates elements of post rock, chamber pop, glitchy electronica and folk is impressively prescient. But really, what else would you expect from David Grubbs and Jim O’Rourke, two of the biggest hitters in Chicago’s fertile end-of-the-century music scene? Camoufleur’s lead track, The Seasons Reverse, is also the first song on We Have Dozens of Titles, a kind of alternative history of Gastr Del Sol, consisting of vastly changed-up live performances and hard-to-find studio gems taken from EPs, singles and compilations.
Where Camoufleur’s version of The Seasons Reverse is a slice of cool but jittery folktronica, heavily influenced by sometime-member Markus Popp’s love of all things glitch, this live take is fleshier and more in line with the sprawling dynamics of post rock. The electronic squelches and squiggles are still there, but shorn of its vocals, the track puts more emphasis on the progression of the clipped, economic guitar and the subtle keys and synths. It works as an intriguing document, an insight into the band’s creative process. But it also works as a viable variant, a way of using an existing framework to create a very different mood.
The majority of the live material on We Have Dozens of Titles comes from the band’s final 1997 performance, and the quality is so good it makes you wish they’d kept at it. Aside from The Seasons Reverse, Camoufleur is represented by Blues Subtitled No Sense Of Wonder, here stretched out to eleven minutes, lurching from its gently glitchy intro to a dadaist, stream-of-consciousness organ/piano/synth workout with its roots in minimalist composition, and ending with neoclassical grace. Other live offerings include the jumpy, acoustic Ursus Arctos Wonderfilis, which contains the kernel of the guitar sound that would later partly define the solo careers of both Grubbs and O’Rourke, and Dictionary of Handwriting, a meandering, guitar-led piece originally from 1994’s Mirror Repair EP that shows how well the band could function as a duo without losing any of their technical, modernistic flair (while paying homage to their American Primitive forebears).
The studio picks are equally insightful and go way beyond mere curiosities. Quietly Approaching does wonders with very little in the way of ingredients: with just a few piano notes, some well-positioned parps of brass and a background hum, it manipulates space and mood with expert deftness, reappropriating the quiet-loud-quiet narrative into something more subdued and more profound. At Night and at Night builds on muted percussion and drones, embarking on a short but spacy journey before reinventing itself as a crunchy guitar ditty. The influence of Grubbs’ inventive playing can still be felt in contemporary guitarists like Wendy Eisenberg.
Rarely constrained by conventional pop structures, many of these often lengthy songs pack whole jumbles of form into a single composition. Dead Cats in a Foghorn sounds like midnight at the avant-garde playground: shuffles and croaks, brushes and chimes, and a whole host of environmental or found sounds make quiet patterns on the glimmering backcloth. 20 Songs Less juxtaposes squiggly electronics with sweetly passive guitars and vocal field recordings in a way that makes you feel like you’re jumping between multiple very different radio broadcasts. These lost frequencies are haunting but also oddly comforting.
But the shorter tracks can be just as powerful. Japanese Room At La Pagode is a brief, interpretive piano piece with muted vocals and a middle section where near-silence is allowed to reign: it seems to comment both on the meditative nature of music (and of Japanese culture) and the inherent possibility of discomfort that can be a part of that kind of meditation. The Bells of St. Mary’s pits controlled agitation against a kind of sublime, peaceful beauty to mesmerising effect.
We Have Dozens of Titles save perhaps its best two moments for the very end. The Harp Factory on Lake Street, at seventeen minutes, was originally issued as a stand-alone single-track EP, and shows the group at their most experimental. It’s a veritable sourcebook of filmic details and collage techniques. Various members of the Chicago avant-rock scene guest, including Tortoise founder and former Gastr member John McEntire, and the vibe ranges from a kind of big-band musique concrète to a Henry Cow-esque proggy jazz-pop. There’s an introspective rainy-day piano section and a final discordant flourish: it might be the band’s single most impressive achievement. The album ends with the equally impressive – and even longer – Orange Onion, a live take on a Grubbs solo piece, with O’Rourke on organ. Gastr Del Sol’s importance to the musical landscape of the last thirty years has been absolutely massive, so it’s right that any new release should be met with excitement. When it’s this good it should also be met with the highest of praise.
We Have Dozens of Titles is released 24 May, 2024 on Drag City Records
Order/Stream: https://lnk.to/wehavedozensoftitles
