Difficult second album, eh? Who ever came up with all that old rot? Seldom does an artist of any worth struggle to regain the form of their debut album: from Oasis, Blur, The Libertines, Radiohead, The Streets and Dizzee Rascal all ultimately triumphed both critically and commercially with their more expertly crafted follow-ups. The Strokes? They simply weren’t that good in the first place. Some bands just capture a moment, they have one good idea and it carries the album. What’s disappointing is they often refuse to carry this one good idea over to the second album for fear of stifling ‘artistic growth’. My view is that if you do something well, you stick with it. Your fans don’t give a damn about you repeating yourself and neither should you. The sin of repetition is applicable only to old people and TV schedules. In that order.
All which brings me nicely to Hem’s ‘Eveningland’, the band’s follow-up to 2001’s surprisingly well received, ‘Rabbit Songs’ – an album so gentle, so warm and so healing that you could roll it in rubber and call it a hot water bottle. The lush, porch-friendly Americana that characterized such sweet, sighing classics as ‘Lazy Eye’ and ‘When I Was Drinking’ is lovingly reproduced. ‘Lucky’, ‘My Father’s Waltz’ and ‘A Hunting We Will Go’ extend the gorgeously rural narratives set up by the first album and bear the same fragile attention to melody. The strings are unobtrusive, the banjos and mandolins evenly tempered, the pedal-steel unassuming and the purity of Sally Ellyson’s whispering vocals effortlessly sincere. With hints of everyone from The Carpenters, Julie Tzuke, Emmylou Harris, Ellyson illustrates all the elegant complexities of relationships, geography and nature without once breaking a sweat.
Naturally it’s acoustic, naturally it’s traditional and naturally the terms ‘countrypolitan’ and ‘alt-country’ are likely to be wielded like swords at every opportunity, but all this belies its greater simplicity and innocence. Enter ‘Eveninglands’ and you enter a world removed from the usual excesses of fashion, where an ensemble of sepia characters unravels stories as old as the moon.
Hush. Something rather special is taking shape.