Hollow Parade — Fathom Street

The fourth Hollow Parade record is forty-one minutes long, has nine songs on it, and was made by the same four people in the same room with the same engineer as the other three. The only thing that changed is what they left out.

What they left out is the last day.

On the previous three records the band finished a day early and spent the day adding — a keyboard on the second track, a doubled guitar under the chorus, a backing vocal to fill something that felt thin at four in the afternoon in a room they had been in for a fortnight. On Fathom Street the last day is empty by design, and the difference is audible from the first thirty seconds.

There is air in this record. The bass and the drums sit where they actually sat in the room, the guitar is one guitar rather than a guitar plus its own reinforcement, and the singer is no longer competing with a version of herself an octave up. Four of these songs would have been on any of the previous three albums. They are better here because there is less on top of them.

The two best things are both structural. `Gantry` runs six and a half minutes and spends the last two of them not resolving, which the old Hollow Parade would have resolved on the last day. And the sequencing finally does something — the record's centre of gravity is track seven rather than track two, which means it rewards being played through, which is a thing almost nobody does any more and which they have decided to make a record for anyway.

Where it fails is the middle. Tracks four and five are the fourth record doing the third record's job: competent, tight, and there because a record needs something between the opening statement and the long one. They are not bad. They are the sound of a band that knows how to do this filling a gap it could have left.

There are no guests, which is a first, and the record is better for it in a way that has nothing to do with the guests on the other three.

It is the third-best record they have made and the first one that sounds like a decision.

Hollow Parade have made the same record four times

They know. They would like to explain. Ninety minutes in a rehearsal room with a band who have decided that repetition is the work and not the failure of it.

The Merch TableNadia Vresk