Review Summary: [a conversation] in the Void
Hi there how are you this is Sunny and Jesp
[and Asleep, hiding in angular parentheses] coming at you
live from the less-than-sunny pastures of the places in which we live, with - as we’re sure you’ll be glad to hear - some good news
[dun dun daaah]: Hammock are finally embracing colour once again
[yay]. The duo’s early to mid-era stretch of releases is one of the finest in recent music history, blending post-rock, ambient, and shoegaze into a stunningly beautiful and potent cocktail. However, the band’s last four records in as many years saw them focusing almost exclusively on intricate
[and, let’s be honest, occasionally kinda depressing] ambient - projects that, while good, did not exactly live up to the bristling grandiosity of their best material. Thankfully,
Love in the Void marks a return to a more energetic Hammock
[post-rock LIVES, huzzah(!), etc.]: created as a post-pandemic celebration of sorts, the album features collaborations with an array of producers and musicians and tunes back into a more rock-oriented sound.
This certainly isn’t to say that Hammock’s latest full-length represents something truly new in the band’s storied career. On the contrary, it recalls and riffs off of the style of earlier efforts quite well, summoning back the way 2016’s
Everything And Nothing beautifully combined these three aforementioned genres into an expansive, unified opus. As such, the two main takeaways from
Love In The Void are that, firstly, Hammock can still execute sublimely when they go back to the well of their old formula, and, secondly, that they still have the skill
[read: magic sauce] required to make a long album flow seamlessly. While chunky records can be risky, attention spans being what they are these days, it’s shocking how sublimely silkily the seventy-two
[72! fuck me.] minute runtime glides by here.
A primary reason for this buttery smoothness is Hammock’s remarkable talent for crafting truly lush melodies. It doesn’t take long for evidence of this to emerge: the early album duet of the title track’s soaring post-rock and the emotion-laden “UnTruth” make a strong case. The rich but restrained “Gods Becoming Memories”, the catchy “Undoing”, and the gently grooving “Absorbed In Light” prove to be later highlights, but every track is plain and simply good
[low-calorie sparkles, innit?]. In normal Hammock fashion, one could easily complain that each song sounds, more or less, the same
[because, erm, they do lol], but the formula at play is as gorgeous as it ever was, achieving wonderfully ethereal textures few artists can match.
[Can I just interject] no Asleep shush
[well I’m going to] well damn.
[Hi hello so you should go listen to “I Would Stare into the Sun with You Forever”, like, right now, GO, do it, yes, you, the reader, go, NOW!] Oh god he has a gun.
[I had a fucking spiritual awakening and/or ruptured my spleen listening to the things about the yellow ball in the sky jesus christ what a banger somebody pls hold me] are you okay
[probably not but hush now where was i -- oh yes the rest of the album is, ig, quite good, though Jesp/Sunny’s kinder words do be rather convincing, hmm, maybe listen to them not me k thanks bye] oh thank god he's fallen asleep
[heh] again.
Ahem. Right. Okay. So. As we were saying: Hammock are back!
Love in the Void may not be their best album, nor their most innovative, but it is wonderful to hear the duo being bold in their undeniable prettiness again. Through a recontextualising of their staple sound within their now more eclectic body of work - and, in the process, drawing from their recent explorative excursions as appropriate - they’ve crafted a return to roots that somehow feels fresh, vibrant and new. As such, if you’ve recently given Hammock a hard pass, now is a better time than ever to reconnect.
--JesperL, Sunnyvale and AsleepInTheBack--
