Endless Boogie - 2013 - Long Island

 

No Quarter – NOQ031

Endless Boogie’s great discipline is concealed inside their apparent refusal to exercise discipline. Long Island lasts almost eighty minutes, opens with a thirteen-and-a-half-minute song, closes with another fourteen-minute excavation, and rarely behaves as though arrival should interrupt a perfectly useful groove. Yet the album is not simply a jam session left running until the tape ends. Its long pieces are built upon a severe principle once summarized within the band as “When you get there, you gotta stay there.” A riff is not treated as the beginning of a song waiting for development; it is a location worth inhabiting until repetition changes the listener’s perception of time. Bass and drums hold the floor nearly motionless while the guitars worry, widen and gradually burn holes through it. What initially seems primitive becomes microscopic. Tiny variations begin carrying the weight usually assigned to choruses, bridges and dramatic key changes.

“The Savagist” throws the listener directly into this method. Jesper Eklow supplies the central riff, the group locks onto it, and Paul Major prowls through the resulting weather with a voice that sounds less sung than dragged up from somewhere beneath the studio. His grunts, warnings and half-formed images do not explain the music; they make its atmosphere more unstable. Around him, the guitars refuse the tidy distinction between rhythm and lead. One may repeat the foundational figure while another throws sparks across it, then their functions blur as Matt Sweeney’s additional guitar thickens the electrical traffic. The piece does not climb toward a conventional climax because it begins already inside the event. Intensity accumulates sideways, through saturation, until the original riff seems less like something the band is playing than a machine that has begun playing the band.

Long Island also proves that staying in one place does not require every place to be identical. “Taking Out the Trash” nearly resembles a conventional rock song, complete with an additional chord and something approaching a chorus, though the group soon slips its restraints and lets the central groove wander. “The Artemus Ward” enters a dimmer room, spacious and strangely nocturnal, with Major’s images drifting through the music like fragments from an overheard story. “Imprecations” and “Occult Banker” tighten the pressure again, but each generates a different texture of menace: one hot and confrontational, the other parched, suspicious and faintly supernatural. The album’s sequencing understands that prolonged repetition makes differences more vivid. After ten minutes inside a riff, the arrival of a new guitar tone, a vocal interruption or a slight rhythmic lean can feel as decisive as scenery changing outside a moving car.

“On Cryology,” “General Admission” and “The Montgomery Manuscript” carry that logic toward increasingly peculiar territory. “General Admission” is the most compact and openly combative of the three, while the surrounding longer pieces allow the guitars to separate into several simultaneous horizons. Major’s vocals become another unreliable instrument inside the mix, sometimes delivering a recognizable phrase and sometimes collapsing into tongue-speaking, muttering or weather-beaten theater. The final track offers no grand resolution because resolution would violate the album’s central faith. Long Island is named after a place adjacent to the band’s New York world yet somehow separate from it, although Major admitted that the title was chosen with little fixed meaning. That casual decision suits the record. The name becomes a blank piece of geography upon which the music can build its own isolated territory: familiar rock materials stretched until they lose their ordinary measurements, an island made not by surrounding water but by remaining inside the groove long enough for the outside world to disappear.