Hackman - The New Normal

  by Paul Raven

published: 7 / 6 / 2007

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Review

In an era of three-minute pop-rock sound-bites, Hackman are swimming resolutely against the tide, front-crawling through a haze of pills and dope toward a distant shore that may or may not be a hallucinatory myth. That further shore is a place of dark humour and subtle ironies. Hackman can see it as clear as day, and 'The New Normal' is a sketch thrown back from mid-river, sealed up in an old empty tequila bottle. As far as sonic lineage is concerned, you can trace Hackman back to the progenitor sounds of sludge and stoner rock. They don't write songs, as such; instead, they build huge sprawling jams that sound even longer than they actually are, with heavy doomish riffs meandering and mutating through a mescaline landscape. Desert rock, you could call it. That's an over-used catch-all these days, but Hackman have the sound just right, capturing the stoned-in-a-canyon vibe familiar from the early days of Kyuss and their cohorts. They also bring that moodily tongue-in-cheek attitude to the table. There can be no doubt that these guys love their rock and metal music – how else could they have created such a monument to the unadulterated power of the riff? - but they're quite aware of its inherent contradictions, and are thumbing their nose at rock-star pretensions with song titles like 'The Anthem', and 'I Don't Need This Shit, I Played Budokan'. While the tracks are mostly instrumental, when lyrics are brought into the picture they have a bleak and cynical cast to them. 'The Anthem' features a repeated snarling chant of the phrase “life is not a precious gift”, a sentence with enough pregnancy of meaning to allow a slew of potential interpretations. But interpretation only has so much value, and I'm inclined to believe that's the point Hackman are trying to make. Music is music is music; trying to make too much of it, as tempting as it may be, is not only pointless but self-defeating – especially in heavy metal, which ultimately is all about the deep chug and throb of amped-up guitars. So sit back with a smoke and a beer, and take a trip through 'The New Normal' – don't ask questions, and it'll tell you no lies.

Track Listing:-

1 Packed Bat
2 The Anthem
3 You Can't Ever Get What You Want
4 Chin Music
5 I Don't Need This Shit, I Played Budokan
6 Ababac
7 Fuck You, I Played Altamont

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