The debut album by Squanderers brings David Grubbs and Kramer – who teamed up last year for a couple of tracks on Shimmy Disc’s collaborative box set Rings of Saturn – together with Wendy Eisenberg who is having something of a banner year. The Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet album Four Guitars Live and their own Viewfinder, which reckoned with Lasik surgery and an ensuing shift of perspective, are among 2024’s most cherished and acclaimed recordings while they also managed to fit in a thoroughly inquisitive, conversational duo outing on Astral Spirits with Caroline Davis plus a twenty-minute swathe of Americana on lacuna and parlor by more eaze.
If a Body Meet a Body seems to be framed by the drawn drapes and dimmed lights of the cinema, but I was only dimly aware of that fact when I first pressed the play button. With the Gastr del Sol founder and Drag City stalwart Grubbs duetting with Eisenberg on the guitar while Kramer – an influential producer and New York City noise rocker who is best known for his various associations with Galaxie 500, Low and Butthole Surfers – adds shapeshifting bass and drones, the opening track to my ears carried the wiry rattle of a classic Western sometimes with a coiled or sinuous tinge of espionage, cynical and clandestine with a slight twitch at the corner of one’s mouth, like the seventies and eighties glut of British spy dramas which were largely inspired by the novels of John le CarrĆ©.
It turns out that each of the seven tracks on If a Body Meet a Body are styled as ‘themes’, with the opening ‘Theme for Squanderers’ decidedly a Western even if it feels more trepidatious and menacing than most of the genre’s output, from the defining works of Dimitri Tiomkin and Ennio Morricone to some of the more off the beaten track examples and adaptations by say Bill Stafford on My Own Private Idaho or Carter Burwell on True Grit and No Country for Old Men.
The end credits piece ‘Blood Trails’ from No Country, the slide guitar work of Ry Cooder, based in part upon the music of Blind Willie Johnson, on Paris, Texas and perhaps too the three tracks from Songs of Leonard Cohen which give tone and shape to the mumbled gestures of McCabe & Mrs. Miller are probably the closest counterparts to ‘Theme for Squanderers’ if you’re in search of likeminded fare. Perhaps the ‘Theme for Squanderers’ could serve as a fitting sequence for any of those films, but one need only listen to the piece to imagine those swinging saloon doors, those spurs and holsters and tumbleweeds.
In that vein the second track on If a Body Meet a Body evoked slow-moving clouds which might darken the skies and send shadows scattering before some big showdown scene. The piece is called ‘Theme for Contrails’ which again seems close enough to my initial reckoning, stratus or strung-out cumulus clouds making way for those lingering aircraft vapour trails. And the third piece ‘Theme for Silent Cowboys’ is also just as the name suggests, a more dolorous composition which sounds like the end of an arduous day where there’s lots on your mind to unravel, and only the front porch and a half-empty bottle of whiskey enough to drown your thoughts lest you start tugging on that thread.
There’s more of a bubble and squeak to ‘Theme for Viewers at Home’, where the associations aren’t quite as free flowing, although by this point I had checked through the tracklist. The piece boasts a broader timbral palette, more springy and percussive though when it settles down it is coloured by a lovely burnished amber glow, as fingerpicked guitar is offset by billowing and mushrooming overtones and distortions, less a night by the campfire than something vaguely atomic.
The moniker of this impromptu trio stems from a book-length poem by Grubbs, entitled ‘The Voice in the Headphones’. The poem describes in ‘prismatic detail’ a marathon day-long session at a recording studio during which an unnamed musician struggles to complete the soundtrack to a film. If the music on this album came to them spontaneously, perhaps the content of the poem was at the forefront of their minds as Grubbs, Kramer and Eisenberg prove adept at making images, with the substance of these seven tracks like residue from the silvery screen.
‘Are we rolling’ Kramer asks at the start of ‘Theme for Pattern Recognition’, the most spare track on the album where harmonics and the overtones from individually plucked strings stretch out against these brief melodic squibs which sound like a hanging modem connection. In the second half the piece becomes more wiry and propulsive. Kramer continues to produce a foggy and amorphous low end while Eisenberg typically plays the brighter and more melodic lines, leaving Grubbs to work out his grittier textures, noodling away and disturbing the sediment.
The oscillations of ‘Theme for Quiet Car’ introduce a science fiction element to If a Body Meet a Body, whose fibrous and quavering guitar lines again find that neat balance between wariness and portentousness. The righteous wrath of an honourable man, the anger of a gentle man or the disquiet of a lonesome cowboy etcetera, before Squanderers close their debut offering with a spaced-out return to their opening theme.
