Album review
Hamish Hawk has announced he has signed to Fierce Panda and will release his new album, A Firmer Hand, on August 16. The follow-up to last year’s Angel Numbers is led by the single ‘Big Cat Tattoos’, which arrives with a video from director Andrew Pearson. Check it out and find the album cover and tracklist below.
“‘Big Cat Tattoos’ is just one of the great unsaids that make up the new record, and it’s the birthplace of the album’s title: A Firmer Hand,” Hawk explained in a statement. “Unknowingly I’d been building up an ugly arsenal of great unsaids over the past few years, and the album became a place I could offload them, and with any luck put them to rest.
“I tried to avoid cleaning things up at the time of writing, I cornered myself into a warts-and-all approach,” he continued. “But don’t be fooled, ‘Big Cat Tattoos’ is all talk. Our hero gets a few barbs in nice and early, and lands a couple of clumsy jabs, but in the end we’re witness to nothing more than a petty diatribe. It’s embittered, unbecoming and wholly embarrassing. It does have a certain get-up-and-go, though.”
Opening up about A Firmer Hand, Hawk said:
Writing this album, I opened up my closet, and a skeleton came out. The thing that links all of the songs is a sense of the unsaid, whether out of guilt, shame, repression, embarrassment, coyness, whatever it might have been. I realised: I am going to say these things, and not all of them are going to make me look good. The album made so many demands, and I just gave myself over to it.
Once I’d given myself over to the idea, I thought, I have to stick to this. I can’t hide anything from it. I can’t clean it all up for consumption. It felt uncomfortable for me – and that’s exactly how it should feel. That’s a really strong position.
Through the writing of “Machiavelli’s Room”, followed by the arrival of songs such as “Milk an Ending” and “Juliet as Epithet”, “A Firmer Hand” came into focus as an album directed towards Hawk’s relationships with men: friends, lovers, family, colleagues.
I thought, this is the body of the record. The fact that it makes me nervous tells me it was the right thing to do.
A Firmer Hand Cover Artwork:
A Firmer Hand Tracklist:
1. Juliet as Epithet
2. Machiavelli’s Room
3. Big Cat Tattoos
4. Nancy Dearest
5. Autobiography of Spy
6. You Can Film Me
7. Christopher St.
8. Men Like Wire
9. Questionable Hit
10. Disingenuous
11. Milk an Ending
12. The Hard Won
