Hammock's "The Second Coming was a Moonrise" Takes You to a Different Kind of Heaven: Echoes June CD of the Month
by John Diliberto 6/30
There are some artists who have been CD of the Month favorites, but the ambient guitar duo, Hammock, may have the most with 8 picks since 2007. Their newest is The Second Coming Was a Moonrise. Given their Christian background, that title has all kinds of portent which I will get to later. But for now, let’s just say it is an exploration of faith, hallucinogens, and memories draped in the swirling textures of processed electric guitars.
Hammock is the duo of Marc Byrd and Andrew Thompson. They both play guitar but that doesn’t capture the sonic tableaus they create as Hammock. For over two decades they have taken the influences of shoegaze, ambient music, Windham Hill Records artists and post-rock to create their own distinctive sonic universe. We’ve been chronicling them since their 2005 debut, Kenotic and 8 out of their 15 proper studio albums have been Echoes CDs of the Month beginning with Raising Your Voice… Trying to Stop an Echo in 2007. They’ve caught the attention of Sigur Ros’s Jónsi and Ricky Gervais used a lot of their music in the soundtrack to his TV series, Afterlife. It seems like every one of their albums is some kind of statement on life, spirituality, death, loss and longing and The Second Coming Was the Moon continues that thread. But it does it without the sometimes oppressing heaviness of some of their previous albums like Oblivion Hymns and Departure Songs.
The basic parameters of Hammock’s music haven’t changed much over the last decade: dual electric guitars ricocheting in delays and bathed in reverb and often processed into something unrecognizable that many listeners think are synthesizers but they are just electronically shape-shifted guitars. Like a lot of Hammock albums, it activates with a mood opener. This one, “Inreaking” a little more dramatic than usual as a glissando shimmer rides into deep reverb drums that hit like the gates were coming down. Sometimes they start out simply enough like the lone guitar on “The Unsetting Sun,” It is the calm after the storm, high surf and winds having left for gentle but debris strewn ripples. Delay guitar echoes out into space over a slowly plodding beat, as sounds are transformed. It’s meditative without going Zen; more of a contemplation of space and time. But it subtly moves into a second part as processed guitar dive bombs and siren wails chart a wasted landscape where guitars are mutated into distorted howls.
“We Close Our Eyes So We Can See” is the first of four vocal tracks scattered through the album. It harkens back to the sound of Common Children, their earlier Christian shoegaze band. Vocals are buried in reverb drift over deep guitar chords at once plaintive and ominous with those Slowdive guitar arpeggios splayed in delays as the duo sing of hopeful love in close harmony.
Another vocal track, “Like Sinking Stars”, continues Hammock’s habit of burying their vocals in the mix amidst canyons of reverb, so even when they have lyrics, they are often barely intelligible, if at all. “Like Sinking Stars” is actually about a tornado that hit Andrew Thomspson’s house several years ago as they sing, “The Stars came tumbling down beside us.” The spare lyrics are chanted over and insistent chugging delayed guitar line into the abyss.
Jake Finch plays live drums on several tracks and it makes a difference. But “Sadness” relies on a pedestrian drum machine groove that anchors an otherwise shifting landscape where guitars fade in and out like figments of a dream and wordless vocals from Christine Byrd call out angelically, but distantly. They do actually credit her as “Angelic vocals” in the album liner notes.
I almost wish I didn’t know the story behind the title of “The Second Coming was a Moonrise”, because then I could approach the track without preconceptions, given that it’s an instrumental piece. It is one of the most purely beautiful tracks on the album as an atmospheric cloud of guitars drifts into a tremolo picked figure in delays and accelerates into a deep siren of sustained guitar. Jake Finch’s drums charge it toward the horizon of a crescendo of tremolo-rippled guitars ala Explosions in the Sky, before gently washing back into the ether that leaves you breathless. And I guess that’s not far from the title inspiration of the song. In his youth, Marc Byrd and a friend in the midst of an acid trip in the dark. Looking at light suddenly shimmering behind the mountains and rising, his friend thought it was the second coming of Christ. I can hear that in the ecstatic nature of the music but ultimately, it was just the moonrise and that is pretty ecstasy-evoking in and of itself.
Christian tropes are behind much of this music since that’s how Byrd and Thompson were raised before they escaped. But they take us back with “Chemicals Make You Small” another vocal track and this time the lyrics are quite clear in the mix.
“All the lies they told you
Dead leaves on the ground
One day you’ll disappear
An echo to the sound”
This is a direct expression of the oppression they felt growing up as teenagers in evangelical Christian homes, a lifestyle they began escaping through music and drugs. Steve Drozd and Wayne Coyne from The Flaming Lips guest on this track with vocals and a bit of synthesizer. I suspect the keyboard string swoons on it are from Drozd because they are very un-Hammock-like.
As ominous song titles go, you can’t get much more ominous than “Everything You Love is Buried in the Ground or Scattered into Space.” Aimee Norris opens it with a solemn cello before drums come storming in with just toms and bass, doubled up by electric bass and a cascading wash of guitar processing, and Matt Kidd’s (Slow Meadow) string arrangements.
The album ends with “All the Pain You Can’t Explain.” A triumphant anthem, it has one of the most dynamic crescendos on the album, as voices, strings, drums and guitars repeat a phrase increasing the intensity and tension with each passing.
When I reviewed Hammock’s second release, Raising Your Voice… Trying to Stop an Echo, as their first Echoes CD of the Month in 2007, I called it “A Gravity’s Rainbow of ambient chamber rock, it defies the iTunization of the world. You want to hear the whole thing, slipping it on, cranking up the volume and riding it into an infinite sunset. The only thing I’d change about that is iTunization to Spotifyacation. Other than that, the same could be said for the new CD of the Month, Hammock’s The Second Coming Was a Moonrise, except the moon is ahead on the infinite sunset.