Review Summary: Take a little walk in the back of your mind.
Sometimes no words are needed. There is no need to have a single lyric to hear what Hammock's debut full-length
Kenotic is about. It’s pretty difficult to tell it in words though. You must experience it yourself. For example, you can sit in the bus going to work or school on a Monday morning while being extremely weary and the rain thrashing the window next to you. Not the most pleasant feeling, you know. But it doesn’t matter.
Kenotic makes every negative feeling irrelevant and changes it to something utterly relaxing. It’s something so beautiful, so powerful that it may make you shed a tear. And not any tear, but the warmest tear you’ve ever felt.
There is one element that represents the whole album. The rain. The aforementioned example was only one way to describe how you can feel the perfection of
Kenotic. Here’s another one, this time around a completely different one though. Imagine yourself waking up on a chilly Sunday morning while the raindrops fill your window and you’re enjoying a comforting cup of coffee. It would probably feel superb even without the music but that one thing in
Kenotic makes your mood heavenly: the rain is still there, and that’s pretty much the only thing needed to make the album enchant you.
At first glance, the music may sound a tad homogenous. It’s very ambient and dreamy post-rock with no big build-ups or epic climaxes á la
Godspeed You! Black Emperor. There’s only the atmosphere and the soundscape, and that’s one of the most beautiful you’ll ever come across. Mostly you’ll hear nothing but the droning guitars and the dreamy keyboard orchestration. It’s simple but sometimes simplicity is beauty, and that’s exactly the case in
Kenotic. Occasionally there are quiet chants to raise the song into soaring heights and on a couple of songs there is an electronic drum beat to make the song energetic and distinguishable from the utter ambiance of the majority of the record, the most notable of these being “Wish”. On another one of these, “What Heaven Allows”, we can hear the soothing vocals for the first and only time on the album. The lyrics couldn’t really be more appropriate:
“Take a little jump in the back of your mind,
Take a little jump to the back of your life,
Take a little jog in the back of your mind,
Take a little jog to the back of your life, your life,
Take a little walk in the back of your mind,
Take a little walk to the back of your life, your life.”
Every single chord on the album is so well-made and well-thought one can’t really say a bad word about this album even if you tried. From the first notes of the opener “Before the Celebration” to the gorgeous keyboard line in the closing track, “Rising Tide”,
Kenotic is
perfect. Just let yourself dive in the musical world of Hammock. All you need is a rainy day and
Kenotic will take you to a little walk in the back of your mind. And you’ve never felt as relaxed.
