Avant-indie/post-rock hero and writer David Grubbs (Gastr Del Sol, Red Krayola, Codeine) gets to the core of his sound with the lyrically instrumental insight and poetic enigma of Creep Mission.
Issued just over a year and a summer since his Prismrose [2016] LP, Creep Mission locates cult guitarist reprising a fruitful working relationship with in-demand drummer Eli Keszler, who provides percussion alongside electronic input from Jan St. Werner (Mouse On Mars) and Nate Wooley’s trumpet, all helping to unfurl a most compelling, elusive addition to Grubbs’ great American saga. Grubbs’ nylon six string is front and centre, driving the narrative with a fluidity and plurality of voices worth three guitarists of similar talent, and with a cool virtuosity matched by Keszler’s deft drum fills, whereas the contributions of St. Werner and Wooley are reserved to subtle atmospheric presence for the most, but capably step in to set the whole thing at new angles when required.
Grubbs and Keszler make the perfect pairing in Skylight, opening the album like a mountain stream which, after snaking its way downhill opens out into roiling rapids buffeted by electronic squall and trumpet blare, before Mission Creep sets in with a jazz-wise curiosity that soon enough erupts into ragged raga-blues, and The Bonapartes of Baltimore - one of two solo pieces along with Jack Dracula In A Bar - finds him stripped back to succinct, emotive, nerve-braiding nylon string meditations, which he expands on with additional, woozy narration from Nate Wooley’s trumpet.
However the two biggest attractions for us come with the grubbing electro-acoustics of Jeremiadaic and the pitching abstraction of Return of the Creep, both cropping up at oblique angles in the tracklist to perhaps rouse listeners from getting too comfortable in the easy chair, as with the pranging, clangorous pointillism of the former, and the dissonant sludge/doom subduction zones that open up in the latter.
