Hammock – Chasing After Shadows… Living With Ghosts

Nashville, Tennessee. It’s a musical mecca for fans of country music and has firm historical associations with rock, blues and soul. It’s a natural homeland for Hammock, if you think long enough about the connections they make with the heart and soul through their slowly drifting and insanely haunting, ambient rock. Fans of the band may balk at that sentence’s last word because, previously, founding members Marc Byrd and Andrew Thompson appear to have steered clear of laying clear rhythms down. However, this, their fifth album, Chasing After Shadows…, provides us with more steady drumbeats than ever before and has consequently pushed their music everso slightly towards something more associative with the genre.

Tracks like ‘The Backward Step’ and ‘The World We Knew As Children’ impel themselves forward through the ocean of sound with steady strokes of the snare, whilst ‘Little Fly/Mouchette’ and ‘Andalusia’ are deliberately cut loose where the band’s naturally-shifting currents effortlessly serene the songs along to a seemingly random destination. The former evokes comparisons with old dream pop bands like Slowdive or Chapterhouse or, occasionally, progressive post-rockers like Pelican, Porcupine Tree or Red Sparowes. The latter, however, is more along the lines of the ambient, sustain-heavy stringwork of The Drift or the downtempo drone that the Stars Of The Lid provide.

At the end of the day, nothing seems suitably comparable with the immersive and incredibly uplifting experience that Hammock offer. The songs are more like watery images of moments in time. ‘You Lost The Starlight In Your Eyes’, for instance, is a gentile train journey with lush, green landscapes drifting past before it all rapidly changes to ravaged sands beaten by the sun and the wind, all ending in a mist-covered, bombed-out ghost town. Then, ‘How Can I Make You Remember Me?’ conjures up a mental picture of a crystal-clear, bluer-than blue dive site swimming with all manners of marine life. No matter which track, there is always a mental image to explore.

Be it the echoic chime of a keyboard, the rumbling of an insistent bassline, the soft-shuffle of drum brushes, or an imperceptible, curiously winding series of vocalisations, you’ll find yourself lost in a world of your own creation. There aren’t many bands that allow their listeners to have so much input into the end product. Had enough of suckling the poison from vapid dancefloor stompers or soul-less copycat pop songs? Let Hammock be your antidote.