Richard Hawley has described his seventh album, Standing at the Sky's Edge, as his "angry record." It's also his "political record," commenting (sometimes obliquely, other times more directly) on the budget austerity measures currently being taken by the British government and how they've affected the country's poor. But if you listen to Sky's Edge without paying attention to the lyrics, it's most obviously Hawley's "loud guitar" record, and therefore his "does anybody really want this kind of record from Richard Hawley?" record.
The rigid formula that Hawley has refined with minor alterations for more than a decade--strings and reverb-drenched ballads sung in a low, laconic voice-- has been blown up and tripped out. The songs on Sky's Edge blast off to far-away solar systems, rather than hovering close to the ground like spooky phantoms. "Leave Your Body Behind You" references the 13th Floor Elevators, but the droning dreaminess of Sky's Edge is more in the vein of mid-90s bong-addled British psych-rock. Where Hawley typically reaches all the way to the back-country sultriness of early Elvis Presley and the apocalyptic emotionalism of 60s-era Scott Walker for inspiration, he's now referencing his own long-lost past as a recovering Brit-popper.
For a singer-songwriter who appears to embody his out-of-time, rockabilly romantic persona as completely off-stage as he does on record, it's a curious choice to finally make an album that's reminiscent of his largely forgotten stint as a member of the mid-90s group Longpigs. Back then, Hawley was only the guitar player, dutifully stroking out big, clanking guitar riffs in the popular neo-hippie mold of the Verve and Oasis at its most fookin' druggy. It was enough to impress U2, who took the group under their wing and invited Hawley and company to open some dates on the ill-fated 1997 PopMart tour. But Longpigs unceremoniously whiffed in its swing for stardom, which made Hawley's subsequent reinvention necessary and, all things considered, relatively easy.
But now Hawley is back making mysteriously murky and all-enveloping six-string swirls on Sky's Edge, uncorking winding and mind-bending guitar solos and burying his own distinctive vocals in the process. The result is the most outwardly aggressive music of Hawley's solo career, as well as the most generic. The opener "She Brings the Sunlight" starts off with a low rumble that builds to a whirring and squawky climax over the course of seven draggy minutes, creating little of the unsettling atmosphere that Hawley normally specializes in, even as it seemingly works twice as hard to achieve it. Boilerplate bluster also overwhelms the title track, which references a neighborhood outside of Hawley's hometown of Sheffield known for its history of crime and gambling. Hawley leans on poor-people clichés in the lyrics ("She had to sell her body/ To put shoes on her feet") before the arena-jocking drums and grinding guitar riff fully drain the song of any lingering subtlety.
Sky's Edge is the follow-up to the sparest record of Hawley's career, 2009's Truelove's Gutter, which stripped his music to the barest of essentials: a forlorn baritone, a somberly strummed guitar, some lightly tapped drums, a weeping violin or two. It would've been impossible to go any further in that direction, but Sky's Edge is an over-correction, if not an out-and-out miscalculation by Hawley of his own strengths. It's disheartening to hear him slip into his familiar, comfortable croon at the start of "Don't Stare at the Sun", and then gerrymander the track into an overblown, "Live at Red Rocks!"-style crescendo. Hawley's songs are meant to be played up close, at barely above a whisper; they sound awfully ordinary when they're extrapolated and flung toward the cheap seats. Sky's Edge has some of the old Hawley magic in the form of "The Wood Collier's Grave", with its Ennio Morricone guitar and swampy synths, and the relatively understated pop tune "Seek It", a straight-forward proclamation of devotion by a poor bloke "blinded by love." But for the most part, it's an unwelcome return to a less distinguished period in Hawley's career, back before he knew how to make more beguiling music than this.
