No Neck Blues Band
Qvaris

“The message is: do not rely on No Neck's music to escape from your daily problems!” Dave Nuss - NNCK

And it's a good thing that the recent NNCK * has been touted by the press as the most “conventional” and esoteric chapter extrapolated so far from the dense and undefined/unfinished Harlem collective.

At the end of the final percussive fragments closing “Vaticon Blue (Theme End)”, the track that completes the inscrutable sonic and alien-trip mishmash under examination, the classic yet obligatory question arises spontaneously: is the quirky, gut-wrenching Blues (?) Band for real (quite likely), or are they deliberately pretending (with equal certainty)?

An improbable acoustic environment, sometimes restless, often nebulous if not downright swampy, neither categorizable nor defined, appearing “poor” and ragged, but whose careful perception will inversely reveal it to be immensely rich, spectacularly nuanced, and detailed, even if occasionally refractory, if not entirely unwelcoming (the fragmented track-trio depicting the not entirely perceived “Qvaris-theme”), in which moderately free-form elements, if not completely musically ungrammatical and para-dyslexic {ethically Crash Worship-derived: potential attachment to similar semi-contemporary sound entities}, maneuver between paradoxical/meditative and ominous acoustic omens, which, sooner or later, await the merciless barbaric sound descent, but which, contrary to expectations, upon concrete analysis of the completed path, never simply materializes.

Artisanal project, “open” and decidedly standalone, whose visionary scope in musical terms could be collated on celluloid with what has been translated onto film by the intriguing filmmaker Mr. Lynch**, creates in the eleven disconcerting sound-creatures composing the "Qvaris" work an apparently incommunicative, skewed, entangled sometimes unintelligible very personal sound-mix into which caustic-third-world propositions (“The Caterpillar Heart”) are introjected and scientifically sacrificed, aboriginal-naive/avant-garde drippings (“The Black Pope”, the unsettling “Dark equus”), fragment-particle dilutions of (quite a bit) unbalanced strange-post noise-rock (“Live Your Myth In Grease”, “Boreal Gluts”).

A blessed/cursed work, depending on the subjective/originating perspective, which (and, I would add, thank goodness) hardly leaves one indifferent and/or, in the worst case, annoyed: it can cause, yes, a healthy dizziness (for the avoidance of doubt: I was already like that before, naturally, to be clear) if not total and uninhibited cerebral delirium; an abstruse amalgamation that literally “forces” a fascinated replay-loop at the end of the journey, if only to try (I wouldn't guarantee success) to grasp what is hazily present and not fully perceived.

One thing is certain: strange people wander in New Yawk (but, all in all, I like it).

* released in 2005 through 5RC, the admirable avant offshoot of the more well-fed 'Kill Rock Stars'
** in this regard, and for greater clarity, watch, if desired, the unsettling nightmare/clip concerning the snippet called “Black Pope” directed by Adam Mortimer.