Hiva Oa are an Edinburgh-based three piece who “produce music with a fragile sense of melancholy, buried under a brooding darkness”. Last year they produced two excellent releases, both of which were released on Mini50 Records (who also put out Old Earth’s Small Hours). The first was a four-song EP entitled Future Nostalgia For Sale, which definitely should have been included on our Best Free Music List. Intended as a precursor for the band’s first album (more of which later), two of the songs offer a preview of what was to come. ‘Badger’ pulses with a simple synth melody that repeats and repeats like the call of some strange bird, before building to a crescendo of crashing drums. ‘Urban’ is a very different track, although equally arresting. It begins with a simple strummed guitar and delicate vocals (sort of like a Scottish version of bedroom acts such as Talons’) and then a mournful cello floats in like a ghost and the whole thing gets even prettier.
The second release was the aforementioned debut album, The Awkward Hello, Handshake, Kiss. The album smoulders with a brooding intensity, the sombre guitar and lonely cello complemented with a variety of forms of percussion to create an organic piece of art which billows and swirls and seems to seep through your headphones. Hailey Beavis also provides vocals on many of the tracks, allowing male and female vocals to interchange and interact (in a way that on several occasions brought to mind an even more sad and dolorous A Weather).
The Awkward Hello‘s opener, ‘The Floods Have Woken The Quiet Sleepers’ starts with delicate finger-picking and the gentle throb of percussion, punctuated with the aforementioned cello, and continues to build until a glockenspiel twinkles, heralding the crescendo that breaks the song as if it’s a pane of fragile glass, the repeated exclamation of the line “We go down” the beautiful shards that tumble away after the impact. Another of my favourites is ‘Thunder’, which is composed of a forlorn guitar, down-tempo drones and glum vocals. Ensure you stay tuned after the album closer for an incredibly beautiful hidden track that is just man and guitar and sounds like something from very early albums by The Antlers.
You can buy The Awkward Hello, Handshake, Kiss now from mini50 Records for a very reasonable £10. I would also recommend checking out The Good Ship, an album made by Stephen Houlihan (of Hiva Oa) and Hailey Beavis, which is also really quite lovely.