ROARING FORTIES

A certainly impressive artwork (a map evoking the southern latitude with an explosion) and an equally intriguing album title for what appears to be a concept album. Still a typical Hammill album, that demands a lot of time and attention from the listener as most of his other albums, this one does not unveil its charms easily. Synthesised beats on some tracks brings unease, with the relative poppy "tune" Talk Turkey is far from my favourite, but when real drums are used (Manny Elias is not good to say the least), the general feel does not really improve in the sense a proghead would like it too. I suppose this is the kind of album that Hammill unconditional fans will really appreciate, but to me there are too many evident flaws for me to appreciate and actually dedicate the necessary time to further my investigations past the period of loan of the album. Just in case you are wondering, the 19- min suite is not really much better, a bit more challenging, but hampered by awful drums ruining the whole bloody thing. This is really too bad those drums are so ugly, because I feel that there might be a bit of interesting stuff to dig out from this lenghty track. But this would simply cost too much time for the possible reward. As with almost all Hammill albums, there are moments of pure beauty, but in here they are few and far in between.

Hammill was clearly in his forties (around 46 at the time of this record release), but clearly with this album they were not roaring that much. His incredibly proficient output would gain from a restrained qualitative control. Clearly one gets a feeling the man recorded every single song he ever wrote, regardless of its pertinence or relevance.