2012-12-8 20:23
麻油女郎
Richard Hawley - Standing At The Sky's Edge (2012) [Alt. Rock/Soft Rock]
[img]http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/61xHriC4OZL.jpg[/img]
Artist: Richard Hawley
Album: Standing At The Sky's Edge
Bitrate: 260kbps avg
Quality: EAC Secure Mode / LAME 3.98.4 / -V0 / 44.100Khz
Label: Mute
Genre: Rock
Size: 99.65 megs
PlayTime: 0h 50min 29sec total
Rip Date: 2012-05-05
Store Date: 2012-05-04
Track List:
01. She Brings The Light 7:24
02. Standing At The Sky's Edge 6:39
03. Time Will Bring You Winter 5:26
04. Down In The Woods 5:23
05. Seek It 5:11
06. Don't Stare At The Sun 5:46
07. The Wood Collier's Grave 3:07
08. Leave Your Body Behind You 5:20
09. Before 6:13
Release Notes:
From the members of Traffic abandoning Birmingham for Berkshire, to Fleet Foxes'
longing for a simpler life where "green apples hang from the green apple tree",
the lure of a pastoral utopia is one of rock's most pervasive myths. But it has
to be said, it's had more likely adherents than Richard Hawley. With his quiff
and drape coat, his omnipresent cigarette and his air of a man who's recently
left the snug in his local and is in some hurry to return there, he just doesn't
seem like the bucolic type. He once recorded a live album in a cave in the Peak
District, but there's a suspicion he was drawn there less by the desire to
commune with nature than the cave's name, which gave him the chance to call the
resulting CD Richard Hawley Live at the Devil's Arse. And yet, here he is, four
songs into his seventh solo album, singing a song called Down in the Woods, on
which he admonishes lovers of television and the motor car and offers "stolen
love under a canopy of trees" as an antidote to the ills of modern life.
Long-term fans might be forgiven for feeling a little faint at the news that the
one-time Roy Orbison of the River Don appears to be both getting it together in
the country and letting it all hang out. They could steady their nerves by
noting these sentiments are set not to the standard countryside-conjuring
musical backdrop of acoustic guitar and whimsical woodwind, but a furious,
distorted riff that sounds not unlike the Stooges' 1969 embellished by layers of
corrosive feedback. In a certain light, the protagonist could be proposing an
illicit affair, but it seems more likely he's trying to rekindle a bit of
youthful passion by luring his wife away from the kids for an al fresco
leg-over. Either way, Hawley sounds not beatific, but bug-eyed.
It's a curious way to encourage a lady to yield her all amid the arboreal
splendor, but then Standing at the Sky's Edge is a peculiar record. From its
title onwards, it sets itself up as Hawley's excursion into full-blown
psychedelia, but it's not that straightforward. The title might sound wide-eyed
and transcendent, but it refers to an area of Sheffield that once combined
breathtaking views of the city with a ruined, crime-ridden council estate. The
title track opens with a man murdering his family, ends with a teenager stabbing
someone in a fight, and doesn't perk up much in between. The music matches. It
uses a lot of psychedelic tropes vocals dwarfed by their own echo, a guitar
solo drowning in distortion, clattering, vaguely eastern-influenced percussion
yet the result isn't Technicolor but monochrome, a churning, glowering,
tumultuous noise.
Culture
Music
Richard Hawley
Richard Hawley: Standing At the Sky's Edge review
Richard Hawley does something of a stylistic about-face without sacrificing any
of his unique appeal
5 out of 5
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Comments (57)
Alexis Petridis
Alexis Petridis
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 3 May 2012 15.29 BST
Article history
Richard Hawley
A churning, glowering, tumultuous noise Richard Hawley
From the members of Traffic abandoning Birmingham for Berkshire, to Fleet Foxes'
longing for a simpler life where "green apples hang from the green apple tree",
the lure of a pastoral utopia is one of rock's most pervasive myths. But it has
to be said, it's had more likely adherents than Richard Hawley. With his quiff
and drape coat, his omnipresent cigarette and his air of a man who's recently
left the snug in his local and is in some hurry to return there, he just doesn't
seem like the bucolic type. He once recorded a live album in a cave in the Peak
District, but there's a suspicion he was drawn there less by the desire to
commune with nature than the cave's name, which gave him the chance to call the
resulting CD Richard Hawley Live at the Devil's Arse. And yet, here he is, four
songs into his seventh solo album, singing a song called Down in the Woods, on
which he admonishes lovers of television and the motor car and offers "stolen
love under a canopy of trees" as an antidote to the ills of modern life.
Buy it from amazon.co.uk
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Richard Hawley
Standing At the Sky's Edge
Parlophone
Tell us what you think: Rate and review this album
Long-term fans might be forgiven for feeling a little faint at the news that the
one-time Roy Orbison of the River Don appears to be both getting it together in
the country and letting it all hang out. They could steady their nerves by
noting these sentiments are set not to the standard countryside-conjuring
musical backdrop of acoustic guitar and whimsical woodwind, but a furious,
distorted riff that sounds not unlike the Stooges' 1969 embellished by layers of
corrosive feedback. In a certain light, the protagonist could be proposing an
illicit affair, but it seems more likely he's trying to rekindle a bit of
youthful passion by luring his wife away from the kids for an al fresco
leg-over. Either way, Hawley sounds not beatific, but bug-eyed.
It's a curious way to encourage a lady to yield her all amid the arboreal
splendor, but then Standing at the Sky's Edge is a peculiar record. From its
title onwards, it sets itself up as Hawley's excursion into full-blown
psychedelia, but it's not that straightforward. The title might sound wide-eyed
and transcendent, but it refers to an area of Sheffield that once combined
breathtaking views of the city with a ruined, crime-ridden council estate. The
title track opens with a man murdering his family, ends with a teenager stabbing
someone in a fight, and doesn't perk up much in between. The music matches. It
uses a lot of psychedelic tropes vocals dwarfed by their own echo, a guitar
solo drowning in distortion, clattering, vaguely eastern-influenced percussion
yet the result isn't Technicolor but monochrome, a churning, glowering,
tumultuous noise.
Rather than a journey into inner space, the album sounds elemental and bracing:
the guitar comes in gusts and squalls. The lyrics frequently conjure up a bleak
and forbidding world, summed up by the way one track warps the title of the
Merry-Go-Round's 1967 classic Time Will Show the Wiser into the noticeably less
optimistic Time Will Give You Winter. Elsewhere, as one lyric puts it, "slivers
of light hang in the dark". Seek It offers a bathetic love story that plays out
among vandalised buses, set to a chiming riff so beautifully simple it could
have come from an old Searchers single. Don't Stare at the Sun is the kind of
thing that made Hawley famous: a lovely, lambent ballad about, of all things,
taking your kids kite-flying.
The musical shift of Standing at the Sky's Edge is a hazardous strategy, not
least because it plays against a lot of Hawley's strengths. Smothering his
lovely, careworn voice in electronic effects and swamping his lyrics amid waves
of guitar could in theory distance him from the listener, and his ability to
create a very human connection with his audience has always been his trump card
as a writer. As it turns out, everything you might have loved about Hawley in
the past is here, amid the feedback and sprawling solos. As Down in the Woods
proves, he's still exploring topics other songwriters don't much bother with:
you just don't get many slices of howling garage-psychedelia about a middle-aged
man trying to induce his missus into a woodland bunk-up. He still has a way of
communicating a kind of homespun wisdom without sounding cloying or mawkish.
"Kindness should be a way of life," he sings on Leave Your Body Behind You.
Despite the guitars crashing and howling around him, and the presence of a
rather West End-sounding chorus of backing vocalists, he sounds exactly like
Richard Hawley. The same, but different: a tough trick, pulled off in style.
[b][color=Red]No. 23 of NME's 2012 50 Best Albums[/color][/b]
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