- Collecting recordings made over the years, Liz Harris comes up with one of her most eerie and arrestingly beautiful LPs.
- In folklore across the world, ghosts occupy a liminal space between life and death, forever imprinted upon a place like a bruise that won't fade. The scariest thing about a haunting isn’t a mischievous specter slamming doors or ruffling curtains. It’s the dread of confrontation—with the past, with oneself, with the idea of dying—that proves most chilling. In this way, Liz Harris writes ghost stories. Her albums are conjurings of the relationships that didn't last, the moments of profound anxiety, the existential yearning that lingers in her mind. The songs themselves are ghosts, memories trapped in the gray area between experience and acceptance.
Shade, Harris's 12th album as Grouper, is a record about the lingering nature of those memories. Consisting of songs recorded over the past 15 years, it plays as an anthology of the various styles Harris has explored across her career. By choosing such wide-ranging material, Harris illustrates how memories materialize—sometimes distorted and caked in the dirt of time, or sometimes as close and intimate as a whisper in your ear.
While blankets of delay or tape hiss often muffle Harris’s words, the melodies remain intact. This approach echoes how memories can elicit strong emotional responses even when the details are blurry. On opener "Followed The Ocean," delicate choral harmonies weather overdriven guitar chords like a plaintive confession shouted into a raging storm. "Disordered Minds" plays like the vague recollection of a panic attack. A quarter-note floor tom pulse quietly intensifies as the guitar drone expands into a wall of feedback. The song swells but stays within its own borders, like a box filling up with smoke.
When the lyrics do peek through the haze, they're often references to memory. On "Unclean Mind," Harris attempts to "rearrange the unclean mind" to better process the "beautiful ruins held inside." She "hear[s] footsteps that aren't really there" on "Ode To Blue" and tries to "bury those thoughts real deep" on "Pale Interior." Verses stop and restart during "The Way Her Hair Falls," mimicking the difficulty of retrieving those long buried memories, eventually settling on whatever version of them decides to surface.
The clouds fully part on the stunning closer, "Kelso (Blue Sky)," where Harris's voice finally cuts through the atmospherics. She sings of traveling on a clear day, excited to get back to her coastal home and be alone. As the song progresses, however, she realizes her desire for solitude is impossible, as memories of a former friend or partner await her return. Questions she cannot answer about their time together linger like "white fog rising up to consume [her]." It's a gorgeous and heart-rending song that plainly articulates the haunting after-effects of loss.
Shade is another beautiful and often devastating entry in the Grouper catalog. By pulling from songs across decades and eras, she creates a new space for memories to inhabit. Here, they can solidify, linger, and dissipate on their own time. It's at once startlingly intimate and distant, like a tap on the shoulder in an empty room.
Tracklist01. Followed the Ocean
02. Unclean Mind
03. Ode to the Blue
04. Pale Interior
05. Disordered Minds
06. The Way Her Hair Falls
07. Promise
08. Basement Mix
09. Kelso (Blue Sky)