Hammock is a duo that, in the manner of a lot of modern duos, doesn't sound like one, piling on the ethereal guitars and synths like Dagwood piles on the cold cuts. At least I think those are synths. Some of them could be guitars-- it's the kind of record where things blend, and you only start to notice the constituent parts after a few listens. Even then, extricating that lovely, wordless female voice that sometimes colors the texture from the guitars is nearly impossible. She's the silver lining on the cloud of vibrating strings.
The owner of that voice, Christine Glass Byrd, also isn't a member of the duo-- she and cellist Matt Slocum are brought in at strategic points to enrich the astral spaces created by Marc Byrd and Andrew Thompson. At 75 minutes and 18 songs, it could be charged that the album is overlong, especially given its general uniformity, but that would also miss the point-- this is meant to be a contrail in a solid blue sky, a smear of sound that goes oddly well with any number of emotional states. You could call it ambient music, for the most part, but it obviously draws many of its cues from non-ambient sources like Sigur Rós and Slowdive-- the distant sound of the drums in particular reminds me of Souvlaki.
Three vocal tracks (not counting those wordless female interjections) rear up from the mostly instrumental landscape, somewhat like the starched, posed jackets set on the barren salt flat in the cover art, but these are only slightly more direct than what surrounds them, with minimal lyrics delivered in a soft falsetto that melts into the slides guitars, e-bows, and other glass-like noises around it.
Raising Your Voice… isn't especially innovative; it is, however, an unassuming record that speaks to all those things in our lives that aren't tangible, yet feel nearly within our grasp, and the song titles almost read like a list of the things the music could mean: "I Can Almost See You," "When the Sky Pours Down Like a Fountain", "The House Where We Grew Up", "Floating Away in Every Direction", "Startle the Heavens", "Sparkle & Fade..." Those phrases are basically what it sounds like.
