If you review music, you have no real option but to digest it quickly, and sometimes it’s tough to tell when an album is really dense or just plain boring. While it can certainly be both, I’ve found that the litmus test usually comes in that weird human desire to either keep listening until it sticks, or give up and move on. This musical fight-or-flight response really tripped me up on Lazarus' Hawk Medicine and even made me question some of my tenets of what actually makes music “good.” If you’re an impatient person, you should stop reading now; Hawk Medicine provides no instant gratification.
With no assertive percussion until the eighth track, Trevor Montgomery's third record under the Lazarus name is composed of unhurried ambient guitar meditations that don’t even start to sink in until the fourth or fifth time through. I find it fascinating that while one could classify Hawk Medicine as a singer-songwriter album, it is so much less accessible than a sonically comparable noise or drone album. This discrepancy has to do with expectation; Lazarus has created a truly antithetical guitar-vocal album. Montgomery rarely stops singing, but this does nothing to assuage the density of the album’s powerful ambient resonance. This fact will turn listeners off in the short term, but is really a rare and beautiful opposition to what most audiences expect.
Even with this poignant converse in mind, I admit the reason I find the first half of Hawk Medicine so much more compelling than the second is that my attention span simply wanes. In an even further reverse of the expected aesthetic, Montgomery has created an album that commands your attention in a way previously unheard of in this genre, and while I respect the tone, this can get tiring. Tracks like “Baby True” or “Hawks” don’t permeate your consciousness until you force them to, and the lyrics, which waver between touching and whiny, require equal attention.
Although it wasn’t long ago that Montgomery was on tour and opening for his ambient faux-brothers-in-arms, Explosions In The Sky, Lazarus has taken a bold step forward with his latest offering. Slowly and introspectively, Hawk Medicine proves that it has love to give, but only if you hold your arms and ears wide open.
More about: Lazarus
