Pitchfork

For more than a dozen years, Harlem-based ensemble No-Neck Blues Band have been issuing their inscrutable ripples across the face of the prevailing underground currents. And although the majority of the group's performances have occurred within the confines of the Hint House, their communal headquarters, echoes of their earthy, protean sprawl can be easily detected in the work of such contemporaries as Sunburned Hand of the Man, Wooden Wand and the Vanishing Voice, and the MV & EE Medicine Show, as can their policies of utilizing non-traditional venues and maintaining an inclusive membership. So too have No Neck (or NNCK) long been pioneers in the now-fashionable art of the unwieldy discography, as they've left an extensive and virtually untraceable trail of glorious, privately-pressed recordings in their wake. With the relatively high-profile release of the potent Qvaris, however, perhaps the time has come for the always-secretive group to allow a hint of revealing light to penetrate their fragrant, self-generated smokescreens.

As with much of their recent work, Qvaris was again recorded at Hint House, and is at the very least the collective's most refined and convincing statement since their epic 2001 Sticks and Stones May Break My Bones on John Fahey's Revenant label. Obliquely informed by the supernatural texts of such early 20th century authors as H.P. Lovecraft, Algernon Blackwood, and Lord Dunsany, Qvaris is a shadowy hymn to imminent oblivion, with NNCK's familiar post-tribal landscapes coursing with some of their heaviest, most resolutely rock-centric streams to date. The album cracks open with the Sunburned-like, backwoods rumble of "The Doon", a title that Dunsany might've translated to mean "The End", before the choogle of "Live Your Myth in Grease" continues the ceremony with its burnished, intertwined guitar figures.

From there the album quickly turns to directly address the void with "The Black Pope", a swirling eddy of spookhouse keyboards, scraped strings and unmoored spirits. Awaiting at the far end of this wormhole are the locomotive likes of "Boreal Gluts", a supercharged, Beefheartian tussle, and later the lyrical "Lugnagall", which carries a pure whiff of Avalon Ballroom psych on its tradewinds of guitar, organ, and far-off vocal ecstasies. Interspersed among these lengthier tracks are four distinct variations of the "Qvaris Theme", a quirky little tune first introduced with chirping keys and rattling hand percussion. By album's end, even this modest piece has expanded into the fractured electronics of "Vaticon Blue (Theme End)", a placid throb that sounds as if it might've strayed over from John Fell Ryan's NNCK spin-off, Excepter.

The album's sole misstep-- and no NNCK album could be considered complete without one-- is "The Caterpillar Heart," a quietly tinkling 11-minute sequence of silverware percussion and miniature nibbling teeth that stands in unflattering contrast to many of the record's bolder movements. This overlong departure aside, Qvaris showcases its self-assured cast of veteran outlaws and wayfarers seamlessly conjoined in tireless pursuit of their unnameable quarry, and you'd do well to spend some quality hours awaiting oblivion in its presence.