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Peter Hammill | The Thin Man Sings Ballads / The Margin+

Peter Hammill generates fire and ice.
CD, Sofa Sounds

Tekst: Dave Weil

Publicatiedatum: 01 september 2002

Peter Hamill, the morose-sounding ex-leader of the seminal (and underexposed) Van der Graaf Generator, is busy on a new album. In the meantime, he's been keeping his fans happy with repackages of older material, released and unreleased.

Recently he put out the following two compilations: The Thin Man Sings Ballads, which, surprisingly enough, is a collection of ballads from his solo catalogue, and The Margin+, a remastered and expanded version of the '80s vinyl release The Margin, a live, two-record set trimmed down to one CD when it was first digitally released.

On the ballads collection, a new listener will get a good cross-section of Hammill's stentorian vocals and will relish the gloomy atmospherics — that is, if they've ever been drawn to the dark side of life. There are quiet, tender moments like the appropriately named Tenderness. There are Enoesque songs like Don't Tell Me, with the Arabian horn opening reminding one of something from Here Comes The Warm Jets, though the lyrics are certainly not nearly as cryptic and the piano melody seems more out of the Weill/Brecht genre. Some of the music approaches gloom-and-doom MOR, but there's always a lyrical twist or some odd touch that keeps it from submerging under its own weight. My favorite song is His Best Girl, with its exhortation, "Keep your head down, baby." And the next song, Touch And Go, approaches its majesty, with its evocative melody line.

The Margin+ opens with the anthemic The Future Now and proceeds to showcase the angry, 5th-Horseman-of-the-Apocalypse vocal talents of Mr. Hammill. Throughout the album there are crashing drums, snaky guitar lines, and deep, throaty bass, the sum total of which paints a picture of man losing his way in a technological spiderweb and struggling with alienation and abandonment. The sound holds up quite well and the remastering is top-notch. The audience has been virtually left out of the mix, and at times it sounds like a studio recording. The wonderful K Group backing is always precise without sounding sterile.

The second disc offers some alternative takes of songs, as well as unreleased songs from the tour. The sound on most of the songs is noisier and more compressed-sounding, and this disc generally contains the more raucous of the material, as you actually hear some audience reaction. Even though the sound isn't as pristine as the original material, it's nice to have it and is far more than an afterthought.

When you pull back the black funeral shroud of Hammill's music, you find an intensely passionate and intelligent artist; an artist not afraid of the future, but nonplussed by it nonetheless.

Let's keep another "marginal performer" afloat and support his music, shall we? This is an artist that's worth it.

http://www.kindamuzik.net/recensie/peter-hammill/the-thin-man-sings-ballads-the-margin/1816/
Meer Peter Hammill op KindaMuzik: http://www.kindamuzik.net/artiest/peter-hammill