Hammock – Stranded Under Endless Sky EP (Hammock Music)

If ever a title summed up the feel of the music this is it. This Nashville duo create gorgeous expanses of guitar based ambience. The music is gentle drifting, though highly polished washes of room filling atmosphere. There are four tracks here, recorded at the same time as their beautiful debut album Kenotic of last year, and as you can probably imagine they haven’ strayed too far from their incredibly evocative formula. There are links to instrumental outfits like the Hungry Ghosts and Mogwai, even some of the shoegazers, yet Hammock manage to imbue their music with a less dark more uplifting almost angelic quality. And Hammock seem eager to bask in the beauty of their sounds, which is a pretty new age concept, though thankfully they manage to remain musically and sonically inventive, escaping some of the pitfalls and clichés that could otherwise be their undoing.