A Hawk and a Hacksaw
Darkness at Noon
[Leaf; 2005]
Rating: 7.3
Jeremy Barnes, who is still perhaps best known as the drummer for Neutral Milk Hotel, has not allowed the grass to grow beneath his feet during that outfit's continuing period of inactivity. After working with his post-NMH group Bablicon, Barnes has seen spot duty with Bright Eyes, the Gerbils, and Broadcast, and for the past few years has apparently been living life as something of an itinerant minstrel.
Over the course of his journeys-- in the past year alone he's lived in England, Prague, and New Mexico-- Barnes has accumulated fragments of ethnic folk dialects from seemingly every region on the atlas, and now as ringleader of A Hawk and a Hacksaw he ambitiously attempts to fuse these varied tongues into a unified, coherent vocabulary. Darkness at Noon, the second album from AHAAH, is a frenetic, dizzying pastiche of Eastern European folk, klezmer, mariachi, Appalachian fiddle music, and evocative jazz. And though Barnes and company fail to bring this bewildering array of streams into confluence, the album contains enough flashes of such melodic invention and daredevil instrumentation that armchair travelers can't help but be drawn to the group's exotic scrapbook.
A Hawk and a Hacksaw's eponymous 2004 debut was essentially a Barnes solo act, but on Darkness at Noon he receives valuable assistance from such talented vets as trumpeter Dan Clucas and tuba player Mark Weaver, and the album even includes unspecified contributions from NMH's Jeff Mangum. This expanded group, and Clucas' work in particular, helps infuse tracks like the opening "Laughter in the Dark" and "Europa" with a languorous, Old World beauty that at times even bears reflections of Sketches of Spain.
Generally speaking, the album tends to be most satisfying on its slower, more contemplative tracks, such as "The Water Under the Moon", a wistful, melodic ballad featuring violin, accordion and barroom tack piano, or "Our Lady of the Vlatva" which contains some lovely, Robert Wyatt-like vocalizing. Less beguiling are the handful of blustery up-tempo gypsy hybrids like "The Moon Under Water" or "Wicky Pocky", each of which are too frantically played and self-consciously eclectic to likely appeal to anyone who dances with less agility than Topol.
Between these occasional lapses in subtlety, however, Darkness at Noon amply illustrates Barnes' keen ear for songcraft and talent for judicious cross-cultural pilfering, and offers enough evidence to generate the speculative hope that A Hawk and a Hacksaw might someday prove able to blend its multiplicity of influences into a more cohesive alloy stamped with its own distinctive, individualized imprint.
-Matthew Murphy, April 27, 2005
Review by Joshua Glazer
On his second release as A Hawk and a Hacksaw, Neutral Milk Hotel's Jeremy Barnes continues to play the antique card, now focusing on the "ompah" accordion sound of an 18th century European village, as opposed to the Reconstruction-era American village of his previous effort. Of course, just because Barnes evokes a certain time and place doesn't mean his hectic musical ear stays in that one place, hence the squeezebox that morphs into a battery of bagpipes on the highly cinematic opener, "Laughter in the Dark." There's also room for a prideful horn that echoes the work of Ennio Morricone and the constant pitter-patter of castanets and marching snares that ensure that the solemn moments like "For Slavoj" and "Europa" don't stay that way for too long. The other notable change from the self-titled debut is the absence of digital interference. On the first album, Barnes threw his vintage sounds into a modern wormhole with much sampler stutter. On Darkness at Noon, he keeps the computerization well in the back, invisible to the ears. Or perhaps the ten-deep list of musicians on the CD sleeve means it was a full battalion of players tapping, blowing, squeezing, and strumming away all at once. Imagine that.
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