Rock is filled with rules spoken and unspoken, but one axiom has survived nearly from the start: when in doubt, lay on the reverb. From Sun Records through Suicide and Spacemen 3 to Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska and so on, it's hard to go wrong submerging your songs in sonic soup or a comforting cloak of cool, mystery, and sometimes both. In the wrong hands, though, it can be a real crutch, studio shorthand that confers mood at the expense of the music. Trevor Montgomery, who records as Lazarus, loves reverb, and one assumes Jason Quever (of Papercuts not-quite-fame) loves reverb, too. Quever produced Hawk Medicine, the third disc from Lazarus, and from the humming organ to the drums to the vocals, everything seems to be draped with reverb.
Hawk Medicine could have been a complete mess, but like the best conflations of song and sound (Lee Hazelwood's "Some Velvet Morning", for example) it succeeds as more than just a superficial exercise in style. Here the pervasive reverb, combined with Montgomery's slightly adenoidal croon, creates an almost timeless late-night vibe, certainly indebted to the 1960s but still drawing from the dark corners of the last several decades of folk, country, and rock music.
The key is that Montgomery's songs would likely work in any setting, even stripped down and laid bare. The melodies coursing steadily through songs like "Baby True" and the instrumental "Disco" are subtle, to be sure, but they're there, and they have a tendency to grow in power the longer they stick around, often with modestly cathartic results.
If not exactly tormented by demons, Montgomery clearly has a lot on his mind, too. "It hurts when we talk, it burns when we pray," he mumbles in the dirge-like "The Manic", like a guy about to throw himself off a bridge, "So who gives a fuck?" "Hawks" is similarly a downer, brightened only a bit by some embellished picking before giving way to a dark, noisy release, Nick Cave by way of Ian Curtis. In "The Sky of the Tall Sun", Montgomery rails against materialism like a guy who had it all before seeing the anti-consumerist light. "Surrender to the heart, surrender to the sun," he seems to be commanding near its conclusion, as if finding salvation from the oppressiveness of the almighty dollar in the only two things that give us unconditional life.
Songs like "Breathe" and "Sister" take great advantage of the spacious yet intimate atmosphere, with Montgomery sometimes almost lost amidst the deceptively spare but very effectively earthy instrumentation. These bleaker sketches heighten the impact of "Sewest", one of the few places where Hawk Medicine picks up the funereal pace, at least before Montgomery leaves us with "Forsaken", its final notes fading like a sinister sunset. When the album ends, the stillness and silence that follows feels almost like an intended coda.
