Review Summary: in the field, counting stars in the rearview mirror
Hammock's latest three albums – discounting
The Sleepover Series, Vol. 2 – could be seen as a loose trilogy where the duo experimented with the meaning of the phrase 'making their sound bigger'.
Departure Songs blew the classic Hammock sound up in volume and length, giving us a monolithic double album which skirted the line between stunning ("Cold Front") and obtuse ("While All the Stars Are Falling Down", among others).
Oblivion Hymns traded in its predecessor's large-font-bold-letters form for a sideways expansion, branching out laterally with new instruments and textures.
Everything and Nothing is undoubtedly the most successful of the three, taking the basic structure of
Raising Your Voice... and twisting it to put its fingers in all the same pies as the previous two albums, but without their overwrought pitfalls.
The first change is the greatly increased use of vocals and drums, which shifts the balance away from the ambient leanings of previous albums towards a more energetic, dream pop sound. Songs like "Burning Down the Fascination" and "Clarity" are comparatively rockin' enough to qualify as the heaviest songs in Hammock's discography since their fuzz rock cover of "Black Metallic", while "We Could Have Been Beautiful Again" and "She Was in the Field Counting Stars" are up there with the most beautiful instrumental tracks the duo ever put to tape. Some of the more guitar-driven songs such as standouts "Dissonance" and the title track even have echoes of the Cure's better output since 2000, shoegazey experiments "Underneath the Stars" and "Out of this World".
The increased presence of vocals means that lyrics play a much larger part on
Everything and Nothing than any album before.
Kenotic and
Raising Your Voice... largely contented themselves with vague, poetic vignettes that were entirely open to interpretation ("take a little walk to the back of your mind"). However, the Hammock of 2016 is present and concrete in a way they never have been before, while still retaining the vague, universal quality that constitutes so much of their appeal. It's not an overstatement to say that
Everything and Nothing is the most well-made and emotional music from Byrd and Thompson in ten years, and that they may have stumbled onto the perfect marriage of old and new that puts them on the path to a new run of classics.
