***As human beings, we develop and implement systems. Mechanical, scientific, political, musical. Two assumptions tend to follow. First: these systems set us apart from the natural environment. Second: once implemented, a system should remain in place indefinitely. But these assumptions overlook a deeper truth. As human beings, we create systems, yes. But only as part and parcel of the world around us. We are ourselves systems evolving within larger systems.
A third album can be a lot of things. A radical shift in sound or subject, a commercial breakthrough, a limp retread. Always an evolution. With Gravity, Ibex Clone have inevitably, beautifully evolved further into themselves. Recorded in a backyard punk dump by Memphis audio legend Andrew McCalla, Gravity finally sounds like Ibex Clone in the flesh. A powerful live trio unencumbered by allegiance to any genre signifiers, making physical music in the environment that best suits them.
Whereas their first two albums projected cautious visions of utopia through a glassy, hard-edged lens, Gravity pulls everything inward into something altogether warmer and stronger, personal and immediate. This is the folk-tinged rock of the Kinks and Fairport Convention, but filtered through a fuzzy SST sensibility, a decidedly progressive album with as much time for pop hooks as post punk’s thousand-yard stare. Undergirded by Alec McIntyre’s sinuous basslines, George Willford stretches out into languid solos and ambient passages of flanging, e-bowed guitar. Drummer Meredith Lones takes a much stronger vocal presence, her voice a silver lining that draws the band’s dense, heady arrangements into call-and-response earworm territory, emphasizing the earnestness and care in Williford’s Pollard-esque vocal calisthenics. Gravity presents a mature band firing on all cylinders, exercising the muscular restraint of late-period Fugazi with the melodic nimbleness of Guided By Voices and Dinosaur Jr.
Gravity pulls things together. After a long period of deconstruction, some form of reconstruction must begin. Rather than looking ahead toward utopia, Ibex Clone find themselves flowering amid the detritus of today, finding wonderful new things to build out of all the old parts.
