Gastr Del Sol: Upgrade And Afterlife LP

Originally released in 1996 and featuring appearances from Tony Conrad and sound artist Günter Muller, Gastr Del Sol's third album is the connoisseur's pick - a knotty and ambitious rejection of rock (or even post-rock) norms that drifts thru avant-minimalism, noise, musique concrète and Fahey-style Americana.

It's too easy to point at Gastr Del Sol's chamber pop swan-song 'Camoufleur' as their career highlight. Sure, they managed to bow out on a high, bringing along Markus Popp, Rob Mazurek and Edith Frost for the ride, but 'Upgrade & Afterlife' is a decoder ring for Jim O'Rourke and David Grubbs' tangled web of inspirations and influences that helps us figure out the entire Gastr Del Sol catalog. The album's bookended by its two most divisive and enduringly satisfying tracks: the droning instrumental opener 'Our Exquisite Replica of "Eternity"', and the transcendent 12-minute finale, a cover of John Fahey's 'Dry Bones in the Valley' featuring Conrad on violin. Both tracks seem to be a way for O'Rourke and Grubbs to reject the post-rock millstone that had been around their necks since 'Crookt, Crackt, or Fly', their first album as a duo. They'd already used 'The Harp Factory on Lake Street', an avant diversion released on Table of the Elements in '95, to suggest their appetite for deconstruction, but 'Upgrade & Afterlife' made their focus even clearer.

O'Rourke's presence is especially obvious, and it's important to remember that his early inspirations weren't rock related at all. While Grubbs cut his teeth playing in hardcore bands and forming Bastro, O'Rourke had been reaching out to the GRM studios, Derek Bailey and free improv great Henry Kaiser. So the album's lengthy introduction focuses on this backdrop, with noisy interventions and microtonal warbles from O'Rourke disrupting Grubbs' undulating organ drones and a sample of the score from sci-fi film 'The Incredible Shrinking Man' grating against shrill oscillator calls forming the final act. All this contrasts masterfully with 'Dry Bones...', a track that O'Rourke played unaccompanied as an encore at a show in Atlanta, much to the excitement of Conrad, who was in the audience at the time. Extended and dilated by Conrad's xenharmonic bowed drones, the Americana standard is given a new lease of life; not only are we assured of Gastr Del Sol's intentions, but we're presented with Americana as a form that's not fixed - but part of contemporary American rock developments, too.

And there's plenty more to fill out the middle section. 'Rebecca Sylvester' is an ideal showpiece for Grubbs' lyricism, and the closest we get to a "proper" song, even if it's corroded by O'Rourke's unsettling low-end gurgles, and 'Hello Spiral', a long-form post-rock slow-burner, and one of the band's best-loved anthems, shows just how versatile Grubbs and O'Rourke were as they hop from cacophony to euphony in the blink of an eye. Timeless stuff - if you only buy one Gastr Del Sol album, make sure it's this one.