Richard Hawley - Standing at the Sky’s Edge Review

Standing at the Sky’s Edge is the sound of Hawley cutting loose, and clearly enjoying it. He breaks us in gently: She Brings the Sunlight opens with understated sitars and strings before launching into a lumbering assault of distortion and Eastern-tinged drones. Its solos might inspire bouts of air guitar from older members of his audience, but Hawley’s hardly guilty of overindulgence, even when the opening lines of the record’s title-track strangely recall Bon Jovi’s Wanted Dead or Alive. Such eccentricities are fortunately balanced well by his trademark old-school reverb, a steadily growing wall of guitars, and a pace that matches the desolate subject matter: the tale of three doomed individuals with strangely biblical names (Mary, Joseph and Jacob)....full text The musical shift of Standing at the Sky's Edge is a hazardous strategy, not least because it plays against a lot of Hawley's strengths. Smothering his lovely, careworn voice in electronic effects and swamping his lyrics amid waves of guitar could in theory distance him from the listener, and his ability to create a very human connection with his audience has always been his trump card as a writer. As it turns out, everything you might have loved about Hawley in the past is here, amid the feedback and sprawling solos. As Down in the Woods proves, he's still exploring topics other songwriters don't much bother with: you just don't get many slices of howling garage-psychedelia about a middle-aged man trying to induce his missus into a woodland bunk-up. He still has a way of communicating a kind of homespun wisdom without sounding cloying or mawkish. "Kindness should be a way of life," he sings on Leave Your Body Behind You. Despite the guitars crashing and howling around him, and the presence of a rather West End-sounding chorus of backing vocalists, he sounds exactly like Richard Hawley. The same, but different: a tough trick, pulled off in style....full text Richard Hawley has upped his game considerably on his first album for Parlophone, leaving behind his urbane, rockabilly-tinged retro-nuevo style for a full-blooded immersion in ringing psychedelic rock. It's totally unexpected, and completely winning.

"She Brings the Sunlight" sets the tone, with slow, dense layers of fuzz guitars, electric sitar and Eastern-flavoured strings swirling modally around a keyboard monotone motif, as Hawley pays tribute to his beloved in his warm baritone. Replete with snarling guitar solos, it's powerfully redolent of the acid-fired heyday of Hendrix and The Beatles, while the melodic affinity with "She Moves Through the Fair" anchors the song within the Anglo-Irish folk tradition. It's as powerful an opener as you'll hear all year, establishing a tone and direction on which the subsequent songs build....full text