The minute you put the record on, you’ll notice a soporific, sepulchral vibe trickling out from your speakers, instantly filling up the corners of your room till it’s thick of a dreamy blurriness. As Harris murmurs her way, steered by faint vocals that’s heavily coated in a vaporous resonance and through celestial landscapes of haunting yet swooning melodies, you’ll feel an undeniable heaviness fall upon your eyes. Needless to say that Dragging a Dead Deer… contains that much of an intangible quality to put anyone into a much needed, deep, and restful slumber; perfect to soak into during those bare periods of late-night listening. In ‘Heavy Water/I’d Rather Be Sleeping’, Harris conjures up an obscure mixture of hypnotic drones and grainy, looped sonics, formulated into a dense atmosphere of exquisite, hazy, lullaby-esque echoes.
If there was a paragraph that could perfectly depict the music of Grouper, than perhaps this would be it:
…I realized that Dragging a Dead Deer was reminding me not of another album, but of an experience; waking up in my own bedroom in the middle of the night and not knowing where I am for a brief, disturbing instant. Dragging a Dead Deer was not itself familiar to me, but, rather, evocative of the experience of delayed recognition and un-place-able familiarity. Grouper had managed to viscerally express in song with startling specificity one of the most ineffable of human experiences; that of "The Uncanny," the simultaneously familiar and foreign, the comfortable and the frightening. The resultant album is breathtaking in the full sense of the word.
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