“…By now, Hammock’s songwriting technique feels like a color-by numbers approach – they just have to fill in the outlines with heaps of reverb, shimmering walls of drone, slow, plodding drums, and plaintive strings. I’m sure Hammock could do this whole maximalist shoegaze permutation gig for years, cranking out cathartic opus after cathartic opus…”
[Listen | Purchase] The latest output from Hammock, four outtakes from Chasing After Shadows… Living With The Ghosts further explores territory from their latest album. As with any Hammock release, the focus here is on atmospherics, with every song drenched in their trademark violin drones. Drums, strings, guitar, or vocals take turns building towards every song’s climax and release, receding in a dreamy haze. The vocals are sighing, breathy, and mostly indecipherable. It should be obvious from the first few minutes that this is a Hammock release.
All this should not be surprising to the casual Hammock listener, as the band has done little to tweak its formula since its inception, the ambient Maybe They Will Sing To Us Tomorrow an interesting aside. By now, Hammock’s songwriting technique feels like a color-by numbers approach – they just have to fill in the outlines with heaps of reverb, shimmering walls of drone, slow, plodding drums, and plaintive strings. I’m sure Hammock could do this whole maximalist shoegaze permutation gig for years, cranking out cathartic opus after cathartic opus.
But is this a good thing? It depends. First, this EP is being marketed as a collection of outtakes, which renders any comments purely aimed at on the band’s meandering or delivering more of the same pretty misguided. It feels cheap to call Hammock out on any homogeneity in their songwriting, if only for the fact that every song pushes all the right buttons, emotionally speaking, almost as if something in the construction of the songs guarantees it. Either this reviewer is a sucker for shoegaze (guilty as charged), or Hammock is on to something – being able to do largely the same thing from album to album, without facing any diminishing returns.
Chasing… was no weak link in Hammock’s discography, and any of these songs would have been at home on it – none in particular stand out as inferior to anything on the full album. Had Chasing… not taken up all 80 minutes a CD allows, these outtakes could have easily been tacked on to the end without any drop in quality or any sense the album was dragging on. As it is, though, these songs are strong enough to stand on their own as a nice companion piece to Chasing…. Sure, there isn’t anything here that wasn’t on the album, but in this case, that’s not necessarily something to complain about.
Chasing After Shadows… Living With the Ghosts Outtakes EP is out now on Hammock Music. [Listen | Purchase]
Hammock Music
