Hammock: Universalis
Hammock Music
When every Hammock release is so disarmingly beautiful, it's easy to lose sight of just how special each is. Every year or so brings another into our lives as if to remind us of the incredible musical project Nashville duo Marc Byrd and Andrew Thompson have brought into being. A case in point is Universalis, the follow-up to 2017's Mysterium and the second chapter in a projected trilogy. Though it drinks from the same deep orchestral well as its predecessor, Universalis perpetuates Mysterium's elegiac tone with a difference: whereas the 2017 recording, dedicated to Clark Kern, Byrd's nephew, who died in 2016 from the tumor strain Neurofibromatosis 2 (NF2), was shadowed by grief, the new one conveys hope and recovery in letting uplift infuse its presentation. There's a relaxed feel to the material, its calm suggestive of stoical acceptance and belief in what the future might hold.
The eleven-track recording invites a description like ambient-neoclassical as opposed to post-rock or shoegaze when some tracks, atmospheric ambient treatments notwithstanding, are dominated by strings and when those featuring guitars and drums are slow and often subdued; further to that, string parts, performed by Nashville Recording Orchestra, are as prominently featured on the album as guitars and drums. Besides the string players, Matt Kidd (aka Slow Meadow) contributes piano to a couple of songs and Ken Lewis adds drums and percussion to four.
The decision to use a slow tempo in a track such as “Scattering Light” intensifies the hypnotic quality of Hammock's music when one's carried away by the music's dreamlike lilt, and bolstering that effect are chiming guitars, strings, and drums that surge like waves in slow-motion. A similar kind of entrancement sets in when “Cliffside” drapes a lyrical guitar figure across a gently floating rhythm and reverberant bed of guitars and strings. Tempo details aside, Byrd and Thompson can turn it up when they want to, as the epic dynamics of “We Are More Than We Are” handily illustrate. The strings-dominant settings are majestic, in certain cases dramatic, openhearted expressions of melancholy and rapture; on a rare gentler tip is “Clothed with Sky,” which puts Kidd's piano front and center.
There's a slow-burning ecstasy to this music that makes it not only seductive but poignant, too, especially when at peak volume Hammock's music floods the room. As stated, it might be necessary to fight against the tendency to take new Hammock productions for granted when Byrd and Thompson have created a discography that's at such a high standard. Let Universalis stand as a reminder of just how magnificent their music is.December 2018