THIN AIR

A true return to form - the album admirers of his late 70s, early 80s work waited to hear for well, the best of thirty years... Full of what Hammill does best: experimenting, exploring, angst lyricism, adventure, not bothering about what is expected - he sheds all his skins and reveals his bare bone. In weighty parts this album is reminiscent of 'The Future Now', 'pH7' and 'Sitting Targets', some of his most innovative work. Indeed there's little in terms of melody, constant rhythm. Instead the listerer gets ideas of what the man is about, what he is thinking, feeling at every precise moment of each recorded second. It's intense. A mood that has been lacking from Hammill's output beyond the mid eighties. It's almost as if he's been too comfortable (in a musically, and most probably exsistential sense) for too long. "I'm so scared of what's in store..." Ground Zero. Yet there's a life to be lived, however endangered it might be, a life to fulfil its meaning, whatever it may be. Sparse and complicated. Hammill at his best, again. I so dearly hope the final sound of the lid falling onto the keyboard will not be the last recording we've heard of this astonishing man...