Review Summary: lonesome and bitter, lovestruck and hopeful
Sometimes, an album just catches you wildly off-guard. It's been too long since I've enjoyed the luxury of having enough free time to peruse random alt/indie releases and grant them cursory listens based upon superficial judgments of their respective artwork, but as fate would have it, such an alignment of stars exposed me to what is now one of my favorite records of the year. Hemi Hemingway, the stage name for Shuan Blackwell (formerly of John the Baptist and Night Shades), blends elements of glam rock, country, and pop to form a gorgeously addicting concoction - his stunning solo debut,
Strangers Again. It's an album that gazes to the stars with huge choruses and bombastic gestures of romance, while also effortlessly sinking into the gritty – replete with dive bar laments and bluesy, wailing guitar solos. Somehow, it's both the sound of being on top of the world
and hitting rock bottom, almost as if the line between the two is closer than you ever imagined.
Strangers Again is, above all else, smooth and charismatic. There's a heavy 60's-pop influence across the board, but it doesn't overplay its hand. Blackwell carefully mixes in baritone mutter-sung verses to keep things anchored in a sad, melancholic glaze. From there, he imbues each song with emotion using soulful, eloquent guitar solos and the occasional stroke of genius: whether it's the way the saxophone fills the room with a somber dreaminess, how the classical pianos feel uplifting even bordering on enchanting, and how Blackwell's most fervent lines verge on exploding into an all-out scream. There's so much emotion lurking – vocally, instrumentally, lyrically – that when he does break down, it feels like the culmination of everything
Strangers Again was meant to build towards. It's lonesome and bitter, lovestruck and hopeful, and undeniably poetic in everything it does.
There's not a single forgettable moment on
Strangers Again. Every song brings something to the table that will make you wide-eyed in amazement or slack-jawed in disbelief. It's not because Hemi Hemingway is out there rewriting the book on music, but instead because he's able to take so many traditional aesthetics and breathe life into them. I can't recall the last time I was
this enamored with the stylistic tropes of 60's pop, or the last time that alt-rock bordering on folk/country sounded this magical, or for that matter if I ever heard a combination of those two styles that rocks to the extent that
Strangers Again frequently does. It's bustling with
emotional energy, and is always both entertaining and well-executed from a songwriting perspective.
Hemi Hemingway's debut LP is very much the sound of starting over. It's stumbling home from the bar at 2am alone, looking at yourself in the mirror, and realizing
something has to change before
anything in your life can ever get better. It's a new relationship, and the intoxicating rush that comes with falling head-over-heels for someone in such a vulnerable way. It's that cover art; a man dressed in all white, standing tall on the edge of the New Zealand coastline overlooking the horizon. It's fusing musical styles, both old and new, and creating something truly invigorating. Perhaps that's what's meant by "Strangers Again" – this endless, evasive search – through both joyful highs and sobering lows – for identity. Such a crisis rarely sounds this magnificent.
s
