If you’re not familiar with the work of Hip Hatchet then there are a few things you should know. First of all, Bronchtein is a storyteller. Like the greats of the genre, his songs paint pictures of one man’s wanderings, tales of a life lived all too keenly, at turns defiant and wearied but always moving forward. The second thing you ought to know is that Bronchtein manages to do this without once sounding trite or contrived. You get the sense that these are the words of an honest man, that every strength and weakness detailed on these songs is known all too well. This is folk music as it is meant to sound, whiskey-soaked bravado meets heartsick sincerity, a brutally forthright account of one individual.

The first song is the title track, serving as the perfect introduction to the album with lines such as, “I guess I’ll just pretend that I’m much harder of a man than I actually am” and “man, I can’t commit for shit, but damn can I act and pretend”. The song also provides the first taste of Bronchtein’s excellent vocal delivery which pirouettes between dust ‘n gravel growls and heart-pouringly intimate confessions. Next up is ‘Coward’s Luck’, an older Hip Hatchet song which has been given a makeover with lush instrumentation (including pedal steel and organ) and a bolder, more confident sound. ‘Small Bird Song’ follows, a dusty travelling song packed with romantic longing, with lines like, “With your skin as soft as sawdust and a smile’s crooked charm / Baby, drinking helped to pass the time but this is moving on”. With its use of migratory birds as an allegory for wandering, the song brings to mind Jim Harrison’s novel The Road Home, particularly the sections concerning the nomadic grandson, whose romantic urges are matched only by his passion for the natural world:

“Would she be physically involved again in my personal phenology, my wanderings that were directed by bird migrations, available sunlight, the births and deaths of wild-flowers and movements and hibernation of mammals?”

The jaunty bar-room country chorus of ‘Travel Map’ hides the story of a man who is struggling. It’s not difficult to imagine dazed red eyes and trembling hands as Bronchtein sings, “The coffee in this place must be fucking laced / I feel like I might puke and I can’t concentrate”. But the song also shows another side to his struggle, the difference between the person he appears to be versus the person he is. Bronchtein describes this false exterior, the leathery layers of what he thinks constitutes a ‘real man’, as “the man I’d hid beneath”, so when he says, “I was keeping it together like a real man must”, it’s apparent that he’s barely managing, if at all. It’s a hint that perhaps all that wandering is taking its toll, and not just in a negative sense, as if he’s caught a glimpse of himself along the way and it turns out not to be the guy breaking hearts and blazing through bars.

The next track is ‘David’s Wolves’, an excellent slice of Field Report-style Americana about good-for-nothin’ buddies raising glasses and raising hell, complete with slide guitar and the full spectrum of delivery, from husky murmurs to great throaty snarls. Then ‘Ladies Night’ displays a gooey tender side, but it doesn’t last long as his girl is soon twirling with some other guy, a boy with whiskers on his chin who “can’t dance for shit”. That doesn’t stop Bronchtein getting all pretty on us for a while though:

“Meet me down by ladies night
That beacon in the sky
Where pretty girls get twirled around
Until they recognize
That love’s about being turned and dipped
And moving your feet in time”

‘Tacoma Bound’ is another travelling song, about heading up north from Oregon and into Washington. It’s also a love song, because he isn’t going to Tacoma for no good reason: “The highway’s only lonesome if you’ve got no where to go \ I’m headed north Tacoma bound to see an angel that I know”. Next we have ‘Words of Wisdom’, a piano ballad, followed by ‘Cars Look Like Crying’ which mopes along in a haze of shame and regret. ‘Father Redemption’ sounds cheery and merry but again hides a darker story:

“Well I went to work in town
And loved the best I could
And mother fortune smiled on me
But nothing that I did
Could fill the void I hid
And fed with depravity”

The tracks ends with the narrator holding himself down in the cold Sandy River, so not exactly a happy-ever-after. The final track begins reticent but soon gathers pace in bursts of passion, telling the story of a funeral, apparently of a father, and our man’s struggle to remain “a man” despite it all: “As a man of god’s voice bounced off the walls / I made a man of me tryin’ to hide it all”. It’s perhaps the most direct look at the soul beneath the armour and the pretense, that bright thing that starts to force at the seams and gets harder to hide and hurts like hell.

For me the album brought to mind Bukowski’s poem ‘Bluebird’. Both speak of that vulnerable core at the heart of every man, and the desperate, ridiculous attempts to suffocate it with cigarette smoke or drown it in whiskey or cover it over with scars. Hold You Like a Harness is an album about tough guys who know deep down that they aren’t so tough. Yeah they fight and drink and make merry, but they’re also sentimental and lovesick and terrified of everything. As Bukowski puts it:

“Then I put him back,
but he’s singing a little in there
I haven’t quite let him die
and we sleep together like that
with our secret pact
and it’s nice enough to make a man weep
but I don’t weep,
do you?”

You can buy Hold You Like a Harness on CD or as a digital download via the Hip Hatchet Bandcamp page right now. I’d suggest you get right to it.

The post Hip Hatchet – Hold You Like a Harness appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Fox Food Records have been busy releasing really good music, so much so that we’re running behind on writing about it (we have already featured one great release this year). This self-titled album from Good, Good Blood is their latest release and in no way bucks the trend of Fox Food quality.

The opening track acts a prologue, an atmospheric and instrumental introduction supplemented with an ambient recording of children. This sets the tone of the album and unfolds into six subsequent songs of gentle, lo-fi indie pop, both sort of sad and sort of not, and generally a pleasure to listen to. See for example the ‘Hold Me Like a Child’ which you can check out in the player below:

My current favourite tracks are numbers five and six, almost as much for the transition between the two as the songs themselves. ‘Suffer Silent’ sounds like those little grey and rainy storms of worry and doubt that sometimes come blowing through your mind, ending in a Continental sample that sounds how I imagine walking through the sodden streets of Paris might feel. But if this track sounds like a gloomy drizzle then the following one, ‘Settle Down’, feels like a spring morning, like birdsong and breezes and rippling waves at the lakeshore, the dawn of something bright and new.

The final track acts as the epilogue, a deviation from the album’s template and the antithesis of the opener’s childlike naivete. The song contains a reading of Charles Bukowski’s poem ‘Dinosauria, We’, an incredibly cynical and pessimistic account of the decline of society and the world in general. It contains lines such as:

“We are born into a government 60 years in debt
That soon will be unable to even pay the interest on that debt
And the banks will burn
Money will be useless
There will be open and unpunished murder in the streets
It will be guns and roving mobs”

And:

Trees will die
All vegetation will die
Radiated men will eat the flesh of radiated men
The sea will be poisoned
The lakes and rivers will vanish
Rain will be the new gold
The rotting bodies of men and animals will stink in the dark wind

Luckily, this doom and gloom is cut through by the musical accompaniment, the guitars offering some kind of hope and giving the dire prophesies (even more of) an ironic edge, less a wink and a nudge and more a gentle pat on the back saying that perhaps things might not get all that bad.

Unfortunately (i.e. because we were so slow in writing about this) the cassettes have all sold out, but you can (and should) download it via the Fox Food Records Bandcamp page.

P.S. The artwork was provided by Rachael Perisho.

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