Review by Thom Jurek
Cole's Corner is Richard Hawley's fourth solo offering. He still tours as a guitarist with Pulp and does session work for a number of artists, but it is clear from his catalog that his true passion lies with making his own records. His production style is simple yet elegant, warm and graceful, with lots of space for the listener to enter into. Hawley's love of Roy Orbison, Elvis, and Scott Walker has left the best possible mark on him as a singer and songwriter: He understands that in writing a song, it's the ability to make the song something immediately available to the listener as either a lived or desired experience. He paints his lyrics with melodies to get that across, then records with the intention of creating a world at once familiar and somehow utterly dreamy and new, timeless. Cole's Corner is an intimate collection of love songs (most of them broken), where sadness and melancholy are carefully housed in forms and frames that understand the weight of the emotion communicated without letting the emotion overwhelm the song itself. They are saturated in tenderness and the heart of true romantic, not self pity or bitterness..
Cole's Corner is an actual place, a corner in Sheffield, Hawley's hometown, where people have met and encountered one another by chance, to hang out, rendezvous, and commiserate since 1905. This song cycle reflects the hope experienced in some of those chance encounters as it flowers and then withers and dies. Sounds like a downer, but Hawley's melancholy is so rich and empathetic, so devoid of self pity and self assessment, it is anything but. The title track that opens the set is like the beginning of as a suite or a movie theme. The Colin Elliot arranged strings ease in John Trier's piano and Hawley's voice, offering a snapshot from a man who stands alone on that corner, looking, waiting, deciding. His willingness to step out into a world of chance, into the world of people who all know what he feels is stirring. The ballad echoes Scott Walker's own vision of a world seen from outside as the protagonist's desire to enter becomes movement toward something unknown and unexpected. This is a pop song written as, and sung like, a standard from the Great American Songbook. "Just Like the Rain" is its mirror image, a song fueled by thin, shimmering guitars, articulated against movement, restlessness, and the desire to return to something left, to find the ghost that has haunted the singer. Here, echoes of Mickey Newbury's and Johnny Cash's stylized country story songs ("Sleep Alone") Charlie Rich's and Roy Orbison's balladry ("Darlin Wait for Me") permeate Hawley's delivery; they alternate with traces of Walker, Jacques Brel, and even the Frank Sinatra of "In the Wee Small Hours" ("The Ocean") to incarnate something completely and utterly his own. "Hotel Room," is an old-school rock & roll crooned ballad that iterates the magical nature of a tryst that feels like it exists outside of time and space and the margins of the universe are demarcated by four walls and a bed the lovers sanctuary. And so it goes. Reveries, nostalgia, longed-for wishes, regret, sadness, and the bittersweet mark of the beloved left on the heart of the left and lost. Early rock & roll and rockabilly, country, traces of the vintage-'40s pop, jazz, and even some blues, fall together in a seamless, nearly rapturous whole. Hawley's guitar sound, ringing like a voice from another present era, steps beyond dimension to underscore the emotion and story in his voice. There isn't a moment on Cole's Corner that doesn't stand up, doesn't fall into the next, giving them all uncommon, even singular depth and dimension. And the singer's voice conjures shadows, glimmers of soft light, street lamps, tears, and the sound of lonely steps on a rainy midnight street. Cole's Corner is glorious, magical, and utterly lovely in its vision, articulation, and execution. Hawley is a songwriter and musician in his own category.
Richard Hawley
Coles Corner
[Mute; 2005]
Rating: 8.1
It's impossible to discuss Sheffield singer and songwriter Richard Hawley without a glance backward in the general direction of strong, dignified vocalists like Roy Orbison, Fred Neil, and Johnny Cash. Hawley himself, former touring guitarist for Pulp and member of the second-tier Britpop band Longpigs, is forthcoming about his music's origins. His influences are not only on his sleeve, they're reflected in his tour schedule and his choice of collaborators. Yes, he sounds like he's listened to a lot of Lee Hazlewood; he's also opening for Nancy Sinatra at a number of dates in England. And not only is the Scott Walker connection undeniable, Hawley has spent time in the studio with the man himself after meeting initially through the Pulp connection.
Coles Corner is Hawley's third full-length, and it finds him further refining his sound. His voice is richer and the arrangements have an extra smidge of polish. The songs are remarkably clear and direct, trading almost exclusively in familiar couplets that have become part of western pop currency. "Hold back the night" is the first line of the opening title track, and the chorus begins "Going downtown where there's music/ Going where voices fill the air." It's rarely difficult to pick out the next line. Yes, it's tears Hawley is talking about in "Just Like the Rain". The countrypolitan ballad "Wait for Me" seems plucked from another epoch: "So think of me when you feel that moon," Hawley croons, "oh it calls to me, as it calls to you." First time through you might want to stop and say, Hold up, there's still a moon? I thought it fell from the sky somewhere in the early 70s.
Yes, the moon is still up there, and Coles Corner is unapologetically retro to the max but it works. Hawley's style, his sturdy baritone singing songs that combine hints of country with pre-rock pop and orchestral flourishes overlaid with healthy dollop of reverb, has a robust appeal. It translates in 2005 because this corner of music was always about nostalgia and taut drama constructed with tightly circumscribed language. Hawley resides deep inside this material, writing songs with the melodic muscle to stand up next to standards. You can make a case against cultural recycling, but you can't argue away the emotional impact of the orchestral build on "The Ocean". As he describes a scene on a gray desolate beach where one imagines every day is like Sunday, new instruments are added bar-by-bar until and the tension is ratcheted up to the breaking point. With the tape saturated at the climax Hawley lets loose with a booming "Here comes the rain!" Pity the realist who reaches for the umbrella.
The closing piano instrumental "Last Orders" is a cover that nicely punctuates how and why Hawley got here. It's played on an upright with the sustain pedal to the floor inside an empty cavern of a room. As the tune progresses the echo around the piano mixes with a dusty cloud of Eno-esque electronic treatment, the first time on the record we hear a sound that couldn't have been reproduced in the early '60s. Then finally the keyboard drops out completely to close with two minutes of a golden, light-speckled drone of aching poignancy. It's then you realize that Hawley's music can go wherever he wants it to go. He's not stuck in the past. He inhabits his record collection because he likes it there and has a feeling we will too. He's right.
-Mark Richardson, September 29, 2005
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