Hangover Square – Painting With An Open Heart
Independent – 6 June 2021
Hangover Square take their name from Patrick Hamilton’s 1941 novel, formerly punk-blues duo Husky Tones, Bristol-based vocalist Victoria Bourne (who has her own experimental side career and recently released her own electroacoustic ‘twisted-folk’ album Songs From A Cloud Chamber) and partner guitarist Chris Harper recorded their new incarnation’s debut album largely at home during lockdown in a one-bedroom basement flat, but, featuring virtual collaborations with drummer Andy Edwards and bassist-producer Mat Sampson, the sound, fleshed out with synths, is far more expansive than that might suggest.
It opens with a brief scene-setting instrumental, The Midnight Bell, featuring slide guitar and, yes, bells, before heading into Retreat To Hangover Square, Bourne’s weaving vocals setting a folk-rock sound and mantra-like drums and guitar rhythm that evoke thoughts of a spooked Pentangle with such enigmatic lyrics as “My relentless skin holding me in/Tear it open my skeleton swim/Guards and soldiers bar release/Time beheaded and left outside in peace”.
Equally moody and shrouded with dark shadows (“Beneath the earth to the world you crave/Memories twisted broken in the grave/They hoist you up to fall again”), Ghost Train keeps that progressive influence simmering before Ladybird arrives with shimmering keyboard sounds, reminding me of a perhaps less over-orchestrated Renaissance, the imagery of release and confinement reflecting the pandemic experience and seeing creativity as a refuge from despair (“You just have to feel something, you don’t have to understand”).
Interestingly, the muted electronics, echoey, distant vocals and synthesised strings of City Slumber suggest what a progressive folk version of Gary Numan (or a spectral Procol Harum) might have sounded like, the lyrics again disturbing with talk of “Nineteen crimes behind closed doors/Quiet screams and restless shores/Never knowing, when the night will end”.
Again crafting an unsettling soundscape, Angels And Anvils is a slow-burning, driving blues in tribute to the late Chris Whitley, Bourne’s gutsy voice twisting and soaring while the guitars wail before a muted drum beat introduces the six-minute, slide coloured, layered vocals, slow blues We’ll Get By Somehow, another pandemic nightmare vision (“She cries through the night/Sees death within life/From the frozen sea/A plague comes for those/Wearing curses for clothes/Statues of sand crash to the sea”) but here one lined with hope (“hold me close and softly say ‘it’s alright for now’/’no matter how much the changes hurt, we’ll get by somehow’”) amid a sea of backing vocals.
By way of a complete musical shift, A Thousand Prison Nights rides a driving handclap, foot stomp and slide rhythm with its lockdown references (“Watch freedoms’ door close before our eyes”), the album ending with another sparse, brooding slow folk-blues, The Hunger, slide guitar and the lazy drum rhythm, conjuring images of desert nights under clear skies as love and desire afford reason to not give in. With a full-length film featuring videos for all nine of the songs available online, this is hugely accomplished, drawing on influences (that also include Plant, Welch and This Mortal Coil), but transforming them into their own unique sound, this is an impressive calling card that can only hint at what they right produce once given access to the full scope of a studio. A hangover most definitely worth nursing.
Order ‘Painting With An Open Heart’ via: https://hangoversquare.net/