There are artists out there who become a stitch in the fabric of your life. Back when I was writing for The Silent Ballet (RIP), Hammock were one of the names we returned to again and again. They’ve always been a band that felt, even from what I now refer to as “back in my days”, like they were doing something unique, something that asked for nothing much except that you allow to let it in. Twenty or so years on, this feeling has not left. Every new record Hammock have released has been, to me, their best one. This is not because the albums are interchangeable, but because Marc Byrd and Andrew Thompson have the rare gift of arriving where and when I need them. This comfort is a reliability of a deeper type rather than complacency, and only music made with genuine feeling can sustain it over decades. The Second Coming Was a Moonrise continues the lineage.
‘Inbreaking’ opens the album with something that sits between science fiction and memory, with synths carrying the cinematic unease of the 80s, an era that very much knew how to make dread feel beautiful. This is a confident way to begin, with heartbreak and hope held in the same suspended breath, which is the liminal space in which Hammock tend to operate. ‘We Close Our Eyes So We Can See’ follows, easing into vocal territory with the calmness that only repetition done right can produce. The warmth of it lands like late summer sun on skin that’s been waiting all day for exactly that. ‘The Unsetting Sun’ has a gauzy, retreating quality that calls Midwife to my mind, a sound that keeps its distance even as it pulls you in, the same sense of devotion broadcast from somewhere just out of reach. This might seem like an unexpected comparison to arrive at where reference points tend to run more towards the likes of Gregor Samsa, but those signposts now belong to another era. Hammock have become entirely themselves.
What this record understands better than most in this space is that a listener can be moved without being destroyed. ‘Like Sinking Stars’ is almost upbeat, with vocal harmonies threading through guitar that subtly holds everything together. The intensity neither builds to a breaking point, nor does it retreat into background noise. This is post rock in a loose sense, ambient in a true one, and this is a band who have long outgrown the need for either label.
There is a particular kind of happiness that only arrives when you are moving away from something. I first heard ‘Sadness’ on a plane at sunset, clouds gliding past the iced up windows, the ground somewhere far below and easily forgettable, and it was the furthest thing from its own title. It ebbed and flowed with the altitude, which is, in retrospect, what this entire album does. Sometimes, music’s cruelty and gift is that it finds unsoundtracked moments and claims them forever. The title track runs past seven minutes and accumulates towards an intensity that dissolves, with electronic textures folding into something organic and dreamy and rather difficult to explain to anyone who hasn’t reached the point of complete surrender. The golden haze that swathes the album has names attached to it: Matt Kidd of Slow Meadow on strings and guitar, Deserta‘s Matthew Doty on synths, Chad Howat on keyboards and bass, Jake Finch on drums, and on Chemicals Make You Small, Wayne Coyne and Steven Drozd of The Flaming Lips adding vocals and keyboards in a pairing that against certain odds sounds like the most instinctive thing. And then there is Ellen Story’s violin, appearing when least expected, and silently decimating everything.
Years ago, a friend and fellow writer described Hammock as having discovered something of an enigma within their formula, something so cohesive and addictive that the formula itself ceased to matter. He was then writing about Chasing After Shadows… Living With the Ghosts, but the observation has since aged into something more akin to prophecy. The Second Coming Was a Moonrise is another entry in a discography that somehow keeps finding new ways to deepen. It will not be forgotten either.