I’ve absolutely loved this band ever since Upset The Rhythm re-released their ill-fated debut back in 2017 and how I’m glad to say I’m hearing fresh material that’s positively abuzz with that subtle beguile that hooked me in the first place.
My eye is drawn to, caught in the bleak Stalingrad ruins of the cover. A circle of stone children in frozen celebration taunting the crocodile at its centre as a dirty plumb of destruction ravens the sky. My pupils eating up the image’s futility, civilisation’s failing hope entrapped in its accusing stillness.
Normil Hawaiians have never shied away from uncomfortable truths, always navigating the flaws in our DNA that have cause so much unneeded suffering, and this new album, the first for forty years, certainly holds you in its inquisitive spell.
A salty pith that psychically stains the sad narrative of “Back Home To The Stars”, an astral projection gathering up that hobo’s serenity found on Gavin Bryars‘ Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet into a tightly bound focal point whose mirrored depth nettles a tangled truth. “We are one-winged angels”, the narrator imparts, wearily adding “We travel in circles” as ghostly possibly resonates in your head like a John Balance séance, dust-balls the lucid words that continue to paint humanity as sullied stardust caught in the gravitational curve of its own tears. A song beautifully clasped in a light sketch of warm clockwork and Ryuichi Sakamoto-like flutterings.
The gloriously driven indie of “Waterfalls_Bedford 330”, its glowing Robert Wyatt-like vocals in sun-spattered celebration “…from a broken windscreen we feel the breeze” indeed as the notion of tune takes hold, filters into the slow-shifting concentrate of “We Stand Together”, that male / female duet buttered by a taut snare and lilac-rubbed melody. “Big City Sky” throwing things wide open, barbecued on a warm-skinned reverbed vocal and a radiant minimalism. The tuneful and abstract floating happily into each other, melding a musical whole.
Yeah, can’t fault this at all, the songs spin like bruised fruit in the mind’s eye, nervelessly feeling round the intent of the subject to moth-wing in subtle harmonics that cinematically table each song’s centre. A burning sincerity suddenly sunsetting an optimistic rush of instrumentation and the words are just brilliant. Poignent reminders of what side these Hawaiians champion — the downtrodden, the numerous victims of injustice that often go unheard, and as the creeping shadow of “North Atlantic” spirals your ear in bowed echoes and snaky bass, you’re reminded of this, complicit to its underlying truth.
The T word deeply entrapped in the Normil’s soul, searching subtly. A magic that continues on the many album bonus tracks included on the CD. Another nice balance of spoken word and contemplative atmospherics that dips a sorrow quill into “Where Is Living” to argument the diarist dart of “Ornament Of The Tribe” and that delicate melody rising softly round it. Bloody lovely stuff, and even a further mix of “In The Stone” still manages to find something new in the original’s gleam, doesn’t disrupt the flow.All melting away on the sparrow piano of “Deep Beneath Snow”, its diffused light gently blown into a brushed ambience and hushed vocal that demonstrate an incising heart-felt intelligence that will continue to scar me for years to come.
-Michael Rodham-Heaps-
