As Boadwee would say, this record is the shit. The Necks were one of (if I remember correctly) 2001’s New Favourite Bands. I was wandering around absent-mindedly in the jazz section of HMV’s flagship Oxford Street branch (one of the best jazz departments anywhere, I might add) and this unbelievable, hypnotic music was playing. And it kept playing and kept playing. I had to ask what it was. Hanging Gardens was the record, probably the first necks album to be easily available outside their native Australia.
For those who don’t know the deal about The Necks, it’s this. They’re ostensibly a jazz piano trio, but use a lot of electronics and odd percussion and effects. All of their ‘compositions’ are around an hour long. They never play the same thing twice, and everything is improvised and built up around a pre-ordained theme or riff. Sometimes it can be fairly mantra-like, sometimes more abstract and intermittently dissonant, sometimes barely there at all.
But Drive-By is probably their crowning glory. It’s got every element of their sound in its most accessible and realised form. The melodies (yes, there are melodies, or rather a melody) are beautiful. It’s a warm bath of electro-acoustic jazz. I decided to listen to it on my iPod while I was working this afternoon, and when I looked at the screen it had been going for 20 minutes and I was blissfully unaware of anything like that amount of time passing. I’d go so far as to say that if I had to give a list of my 20 favourite albums since the millennium it would be in there. It’s not dry or ambient or noodly – it’s got a real insistent energy to it and I’d forgotten how truly great it is.