Author: Peter Podbrežnik
Artist: Hammill, Peter
Label: Burning Shed
Released: 2017
Length: 42:55
Rating: 4/5
»From the Trees« is the thirty-fifth solo album from English prog-rock icon Peter Hammill, best known for his magnificent Van der Graaf Generator legacy, though his solo career is at least as fascinating when it comes to sheer stylistic variety, lyrical richness and insight, outstanding atmosphere and compositional unpredictability. The brilliant Hammill, long since written into the books as a prog rock legend, is still a bitter critic of grey everyday life even in his later years, though for a long time now not in such a furious and revolutionary way. His vocal powers aren’t what they used to be, so this time there’s neither hide nor hair of the old vocal thunder. On the other hand, his trademark vocal charisma is still here, and it really comes into its own in the occasional choral harmonies, like on »Torpor« and »On Deaf Ears«.
»From the Trees« is, as expected, a distinctly melancholic album, though in the past we’ve been used to Peter’s much gloomier records. In lyrics that are mostly pretty personal, the legendary singer and songwriter often touches on the awareness of time slipping away fast. In some of them, like »What Lies Ahead«, he plays the man who has always swung somewhere between two worlds in his views (as a kid he sang in a Jesuit choir, while as a young man he got hooked on science, especially physics, and later became a big critic of organized institutions, religious ones included), and asks what lies on ‘the other side’ once physical existence is over. For his confessions he mostly leans on melancholic, calm piano arrangements, while the occasional guitar improvisations are very rare and mostly just there to spice things up now and then. »From the Trees« is a relatively short album, just like his solo albums from the seventies were because of the format limits of the time, but over all ten compositions Peter still manages to get the essence across.
»From the Trees« is the kind of album we sort of expected from Mr. Hammill in the autumn of his career: a deeply reflective, personal record with a remarkably mature stamp, but on the other hand not nearly as thrilling, let alone rebellious, as was typical of the golden and also younger period of his music-making. Expecting a musician who is about to turn seventy to deliver something revolutionary, the way he did it as a joke when he was thirty, is honestly pretty unrealistic. Longtime followers will gladly give it another listen, because it still contains plenty of the qualities that got Peter written into the books among the immortal icons of experimental music, regardless of the lack of fresh ideas.
Lineup
Peter Hammill – vocals, piano, guitar, production
Production
Peter Hammill
Tracklist
1. My Unintended
2. Reputation
3. Charm Alone
4. What Lies Ahead
5. Anagnorisis
6. Torpor
7. Milked
8. Girl to the North Country
9. On Deaf Ears
10. The Descent
