Now Playing: '(We Ain't No) Vampire Bats' from Meat by Hawksley Workman

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Over the last seven years (2003's Lover/Fighter started this trend), Hawksley Workman has continually trailed ever further from the fantastic and plastic vaudevillian center that he established with (Last Night We Were) The Delicious Wolves and elected to test drive a host of personas and images – from the modern and idiosyncratic new romantic aesthete on Treeful Of Starling to a hyper-masculine chest-beater on Los Manlicious to a classic rocking bard on Between The Beautifuls. In each case and as each successive album has come out, Hawksley has successfully deepened and expanded his character by playing them well but never totally giving himself over to them; one could almost assume there's a kicker line appended to the bottom of the liner  notes of each successive release that reads, “featuring Hawksley Workman as this new <insert appropriate adjective here> kind of character.”

To a certain degree, that pattern continues on Meat; the streamlined electronics and keyboards in songs like “You Don't Just Want To Break Me (You Want To Tear Me Apart),” “Baby Mosquito” and “The Ground We Stand On” offer a sort of chilly, world music quality to the proceedings but there's no arguing that those elements are only edging into a dramatism that finds Hawksley Workman orchestrating a return to the absurdist, “Jealous of Your Cigarette” theater that opened the singer's career.

Those quirky electronics don't manifest right away (“Song For Sarah Jane” opens the record with a stripped-to-nothing-but-piano plaint) but, when they do, the shift between singer-songwriter-esque introspection and guitar-driven performance art is complete and seamless. Using a garish but enormous production wherein guitars distort in the cleanest possible way (check “French Girl In LA”), Hawksley turns classic guitar rock forms on their collective ear as he over-exerts every convention of the form and turns it into a whole different kind of experience all its own. Translation? Suffice it to say that as he the singer laminates each of these eleven songs as he works his way along through them, vacuum-sealing the rough edges down to make them safe and cute in their own odd little way; he Hawksley-izes them.

The upside to that is, because fans haven't heard the singer utilize this approach or style in a while, it will strike them as a genuine return. Think of Meat as (Last Night We Were) The Delicious Wolves v. 2.0 given it's obviously modern-sounding than any of the material that the singer has released previously (surprising too – for a well-schooled drummer to use electronic percussion so heavily), but it's still aiming in that direction.

So does Meat qualify as a genuine return to form for Hawksley Workman? Well, yes, in many ways the album is the enactment of a return, but it has the added benefit of including some new dynamics (more well-orchestrated vocal performances beyond the obligatory gang chorus mark the most noticeable difference in performance) and ideas that the singer has picked up since last he tread upon this vaudevillian terrain, so it comes across here with more force and confidence along with a bigger sound to back it all up. Meat is the best kind of return to form for Hawksley Workman; he's back on his first act, but he's also renovated the theater to give it some fresh appeal.

Artist:
www.hawksleyworkman.com/
www.hawksleyworkman.com/

Download:
Hawksley Workman – "We'll Make Time (Even When There Ain't No Time)" – Meat

Further Reading:
Ground Control's review of Los Manlicious
Ground Control's review of For Him And The Girls (reissue)

Album:
Meat comes out on January 26, 2010 and will be available as a Canadian import. Pre-order it here on Amazon .