The visceral N.Y. string quartet's third solo album is a collection of dark thoughts and relentless pressures: Ethel function as a living affront to the misconception that chamber music is polite, white-napkin stuff.
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Ethel's Heavy begins unceremoniously, by jabbing a tuning fork in your nerve endings. The first piece on the New York string quartet's latest solo record, by Don Byron, is called "Four Thoughts on Marvin Gaye": All four of Byron's thoughts on Marvin Gaye, it turns out, are violent. His first movement deposits us in the midst of a furious scrabble; it's unclear what's happening, but it's urgent. It's possible that several cats are fighting several dogs. The quartet attack a descending figure in lockstep unison, one with a difficult-to-track time signature. If you attempted to conduct it, you might trip and fall. Seconds in, the figure evaporates: The violins peel off into glass shards, and the cello starts moaning. It's a relief from the opening melee, but only insofar as scalp-prickling fear that there is a serial killer lurking in your home is technically preferable to the certainty of being stabbed to death.
Pardon the visceral language; Ethel are an infectiously visceral quartet. No matter the personnel (they were founded in 1998, and have swapped out some members since, as do most long-running quartets), their playing tends to be lusty, committed, charged with messy exuberance. They are heroically unafraid to make their instruments honk like geese or blat like car horns when the music calls for it. Heavy is their third solo album and first since 2006, when they released an album called, significantly, Light. The music on Light played on both meanings of its title: illumination and ease. By contrast, Heavy is a collection of dark thoughts and relentless pressures. Ethel-- which currently consists of Cornelius Dufallo and Jennifer Choi on first and second violin; Dorothy Lawson on cello, and Ralph Farris on viola-- function as a living affront to the misconception that chamber music is polite, white-napkin stuff, best deployed at corporate functions and rehearsal dinners as civilizing perfume. Heavy is one of their most persuasive cases yet.
The tensile, discordant "Four Thoughts", both a workout and a minefield, is one hell of an introduction. It's a morbidly mesmerizing work, Byron opening hatches into into furtive pockets of wistful, jazz-inflected harmony and slamming them abruptly shut for more surgical-saw dissonances. If this is Marvin Gaye, it is the Gaye of "I Heard It Through the Grapevine", driven up and through the ceiling of derangement.
The following work, "Spheres", by composer John Halle, starts off by conjuring a train. Innocent enough. But this is not a happy, Aaron Copland-esque choo-choo. First we hear the clear rendering of a whistle from afar, Doppler-ing its way into earshot. But as rendered by the violins, it's a sour, whining noise, unclean or impure somehow. Then, the cello and viola, bolstered with a slightly cruel hint of amplification, begin bouncing their bows aggressively against the strings, evoking locomotion's forward-thrust monotony with none of its smoothness. If we're riding this train, we're hanging by our fingers to its outside. The piece seethes in place with magnetic conviction for exactly nine minutes and 11 seconds before burning off, disappearing back into the distance.
For about three-quarters of its length, Heavy bears down on you like this. "Early That Summer", by Bang on a Can co-founder Julia Wolfe, consists of nothing more than a series of dark tremolos. If the piece could be a gesture, it would be of someone jabbing a thumb into your sternum repeatedly. The players dig into the strings with the weight and determination of a small child fist-gripping a pencil and inscribing with all his might. When the pressure finally eases, in the album's back half, it's into a jumpy, uncertain sort of ease. "No Nickel Blues", by John King, takes the skeleton of a blues vamp for its backbone, whispering the rhythm over and over in hushed plucks. Above it, violins play wispy, ether-trailing arpeggios. The landscape evoked is of a fairly ominous stretch of back-country, one in which you feel acutely ill-equipped to survive, if it somehow came to that.
Heavy is vital, haunting listening. It can also be enervating. "La Citadelle", by the N.Y.-based composer Raz Mesinai, erupts into a horror-show scream repeatedly. Mesinai claims influence from inflamed futurists like Edgard Varèse and Stockhausen, and you can hear their teeth-grinding insistence, their obsession with mechanization, reflected in his music. Ethel play the work like a series of sputtering wires.
There are two calming, restorative breaths to be had: One is David Lang's reflection-pool of harmonies "Wed". As always with Lang, there are hints of emotional disturbance pulling in the harmonies, lingering doubts that never dissipate, but in the context of Heavy, it's a spa visit. The other is Kenji Bunch's "String Cycle No. 1", a cool, inscrutable tabula rasa of open-string drones and vaguely Native-American melodies. The final piece, a gracefully antic, hip-shifting work by the Marcelos Zarvos, is almost impishly light after what preceded it: following an hour-long headlock, a breezy peck on the cheek. It reaffirms Ethel's status as a necessary jet of cold water in the contemporary classical scene.