Hanging Stars - A New Kind of Sky

  by Adrian P

published: 17 / 3 / 2020

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After years fronting The See See, Richard Olson has slowly but assuredly established The Hanging Stars as his main musical vehicle, transposing the former band’s jangle-powered psych-pop idioms into more overtly vintage Americana-hued shapes along the way. This third album from the five-piece (featuring bassist/vocalist Sam Ferman, drummer Paulie Cobra, multi-instrumentalist/vocalist Patrick Ralla and pedal-steel-guitarist Joe Harvey-Whyte alongside Olson on lead vocals and guitar), finds the journey continuing with a calming confidence but also some subtly uplifted ambition. This means that whilst exercises in hybridising the Nashville-country subversions of ‘Sweetheart of the Rodeo’ with the folk-rock litheness of ‘Younger Than Yesterday’ are successfully sustained across the likes of ‘(I’ve Seen) the Summer in Her Eyes’, the title-track and ‘I Woke Up in July’, there are further elaborations on the twists and turns that crept into 2018’s preceding ‘Songs for Somewhere Else’ LP. Hence, elsewhere the group shrewdly stretch out their sonic tapestries into wider arrangements. This leads fruitfully to the mariachi-framed tumult of the organ and brass-bolstered ‘Three Rolling Hills’, the layered Crosby, Stills & Nash harmonies draped across ‘Choir of Criers’, the bar room piano-driven potency of The Kinks-meets-The Coral sing-a=long that is ‘I Will Please You’, the soul-slanted inflections of ‘Lonely Rivers’ and the gospel-swellings of ‘I Was a Stone’. Whilst admittedly, these understated shifts don’t radically refashion the core modus operandi of The Hanging Stars, they are enough to push Olson and co. out of a comfort zone and mark out ‘A New Kind of Sky’ as a perceptibly admirable attempt to find refreshed routes in and out of well-trodden paths.

Track Listing:-

1 Choir of Criers
2 I Woke Up in July
3 Three Rolling Hills
4 (I've Seen) The Summer in Her Eyes
5 Heavy Blue
6 (Song for) Fred Neil
7 I Will Please You
8 Lonely Rivers
9 I Was a Stone
10 A New Kind of Sky

Band Links:-

https://www.facebook.com/thehangingstars
http://www.thehangingstars.com/

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