Hamish Hawk effortlessly builds on the success of ‘Heavy Elevator’.
Such is Hamish Hawk’s fascination for the urbane American artist Bill Callahan that not only is one of Angel Numbers’ songs christened in his honour, but a second resulted directly from a dream a visitation the Scot had one night.
In this fantasy, the man who formerly recorded as Smog uttered the couplet: ‘When you hate the song, come and find me / When you’ve spent too long staring at Money’, lines which subsequently made it into the song of the same name.
Despite the lack of actual contact, perhaps Callahan neatly summed up his acolyte’s situation on the rustling country ode Jim Cain, a tune which contains the aphorism: ‘I started telling the story without knowing the end’, and a line that’s as good a summation as any other.
Stories after all are what makes the Edinburgher’s music tick, ones sketched in vivid, literate tones so rich that it feels almost like mental gluttony just to hear them.
And for almost a decade Hamish Hawk’s real world was, until the release of 2021’s Heavy Elevator, a largely unacknowledged slog; gigging sporadically, recording when money allowed and, career-wise, perpetually turning the same maddening circle.
His first full outing proper changed all that, narrowly missing out on the year’s Best Scottish Album gong and in the process acting as a recruiting drive for a cerebral take on pop which was soon being compared to the works of Jarvis Cocker, Leonard Cohen and Scott Walker.
Illustrious names all, but these are ones that ensure Angel Numbers – comprising material written in lockdown at the same time as its predecessor – comes met with far higher expectations.
Produced in only a couple of weeks with Idlewild’s Rod Jones, this time Hamish Hawk decided to let bandmates Andrew Pearson and Stefan Maurice work on structure whilst he delved even deeper into that evocative lyrical frame of reference.
A risk clearly, but the method has produced freedom to branch and explore – and the outcome is as idiosyncratically thrilling as doubtless the singer’s fingers were crossed for.
Putting Bill Callahan reluctantly aside, sparkling opener Once Upon An Acid Glance’s play on failed love namechecks Dylan Thomas as it employs handclaps and a string section, all whilst pulling off the trick of patronizing nobody except its subject.
Think Of Us Kissing follows: think of widescreen rock and roll with a chorus The Boss would approve of, whilst in prose the thousand cuts of desired fame slice to the tock of the ticking clock.
Immediately after that it’s three for a very different for three via Elvis Look-alike Shadows, its guitars and swirling organ conferring Britpop for nostalgists who can only look forward, a snatch of an itinerant’s previous life recounted by: ‘They were restless days/On occasion, got paid.’
Now the envelope even stretches to a pair of collaborations, the Harmonium-driven Frontman on which Hamish Hawk gamely attempts to not be upstaged by the charismatic Anna B Savage, and Rest & Veneers with Samantha Crain, the latter a love song bathed in pathos and the sweet realities of relationships, of snatched bus stop kisses and you wash I’ll dry.
Alone, in groups, with strangers or with friends, these are the best places in which to tell Hamish Hawk’s story as it is.
They’re performed by a man who waited for the perfect time that never came until it did, a chance gained simply because he realized he had the gift to decide when it was.
Angel Numbers will leave you pleased you don’t know its end, only that there’s an everyday chance that a hawk can turn those who listen into doves.
