The Philadelphia-based indie rock songwriter explores a lifetime of passion on her wide-ranging debut.
Though Chinook is her debut solo record, Mallory Hawk is no rookie. After graduating from college, she sold merch and scanned tickets at venues in Boston; then, during a decade in New York, she played in the post-punk band Customer and the tender indie-rock project Trace Mountains (and served as the touring bassist for M(h)aol, a feminist punk group from Ireland). She was employed for a while by the indie-pop label Double Double Whammy, eventually working her way up to become its director. These days, she avails herself of a seemingly endlessly renewable musical resource: the indie-rock community in Philly, where she now lives.
Her solo album reflects these varied pursuits along with her knowledge of the unique exhaustion and exhilaration that come with dedicating yourself to music. Chinook bounces through a range of styles, many of them drawing on her previous output: There’s cathartic 2010s indie rock, as on the opening “The Mirror”; Gang of Four-inspired dance-punk on “D’Anger,” not far off from her work in Customer. Indie-folk tracks like “Revolver” have an aching lilt that evokes Kathleen Edwards or Sheryl Crow, and the slow-burning “Four O’Clocks” wouldn’t feel out of place on the Double Double Whammy roster. Hawk reaches further afield here, too—to full-on new-wave on “Superhighway” (inspired, Hawk says, by her collection of Russian darkwave tapes) and garage rock on “Caretaker.” She makes the pivots between these styles gracefully, giving them a common thread by centering her expressive voice.
Chinook also reaches back further than Hawk’s years in northeastern music scenes in songs that draw on her childhood in Fayetteville, North Carolina. She returned to her hometown while putting Chinook together, and the record takes its name from the helicopters she got used to hearing overheard while growing up in a military town. Perhaps that accounts for the Southern twang on tracks like “Low Rise” and “Rotten Man,” whose lyrics deal directly with Hawk’s roots. The latter is a country-tinged track about addiction within her family; the former is about coming of age under restrictive Christianity: “Jesus looked at me in my low-rise jeans, age 13,” she sings over shuffling guitar, her voice accompanied by discomfiting harmonies. “If I kissed any girls, I’d burn in my bedroom.”
A sense of weariness carries across Chinook’s songs: In light of all her music-related jobs, you might read them as tracing the burnout that comes from trying to sustain your passion as a career. “I’m serving up my servitude,” she sings on “D’Anger.” “I’m barely digging out.” On “Caretaker,” she’s reached a boiling point, hollering, “I’m out of my mind!” with punk ferocity. By the album’s more somber stretch of closing tracks, the emotional pendulum has swung back to a downcast mode: “What’s another day all alone?” she sighs in the first verse of “Felicity,” a question that transforms into “what’s another year all alone?” in the second. In contrast to the genre-hopping energy of the record’s earlier tracks, this combination of slowed momentum, and the diminishing returns of novel sounds and styles, means the record ends on a slightly deflated note.
But Chinook is well-served by its production, which bolsters Hawk’s genre experiments without being flashy. Most of the songs feature straightforward guitar-bass-drums arrangements, complimented by occasional diversions—shimmering synth runs on “Superhighway”; French horn and flugelhorn on “Four O’Clocks”; ripping guitar solos on “The Mirror” and “Low Rise.” Making the record in Philadelphia and collaborating with a handful of local faves—including producer Samuel Acchione, who’s played with Alex G, Craig Hendrix of Japanese Breakfast, and Will Butera of Joy Again—was what convinced Hawk to move to the city full-time. Given Hawk’s history of supporting other people’s musical endeavors, it’s both charming and unsurprising to hear her bolstered by her new community .
