There’s a few factors around Maybe They Will Sing For Us Tomorrow which sort of give the game away before even listening to the music. Firstly, the artwork has been created by Riceboy Sleeps, an Icelandic artmaking duo consisting of Sigur Ros’ Jonsi Birgisson and Parachutes’ Alex Sommers. Secondly, the music within was originally conceived and created as the soundtrack for an after party to celebrate Riceboy Sleeps’ first exhibition outside of Reykjavik, in smalltown Arizona, USA. Needless to say, reverb is the lead instrument in these recordings.
Hammock limited themselves to the sounds the duo, Marc Byrd and Andrew Thompson, could make themselves live with, for the album itself, some understated but vital contributions from vocalist Christine Glass Byrd and cellist Matt Slocum. The album is a peaceful wash of lush spaciousness. Built on guitar loops fed through canyons of processing, the individual pieces tend to blur together in a manner that makes them very cohesive. There are no beats, no voices (aside from the aforementioned Christine Glass Byrd adding elegiac soprano to album opener ‘Gold Star Mothers’). Guitar drones shift slowly in a melancholic blur. There is none of the rise and fall of Sigur Ros dynamics, nor the variety of timbre – the focus is much more subdued. While this means the music can sometimes drift off into the background, in the correct listening environment the effect is immersive.
Hammock unashamedly deal with the creation of sonic beauty. They sometimes veer into a sort of underground saccharine which the odd slice of grit might have warded off, but the album is single-minded in its mood creation and certainly worth investigation.
Adrian Elmer
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