Richard Hawley, in Standing at the Sky’s Edge, has made an album that comes close to drowning under the weight of its own sound. Luckily, his shoulders are just broad enough to keep it afloat.
Standing at the Sky’s Edge is new sonic territory as far as Richard Hawley’s solo career goes, but it’s certainly ground tried and tested by others – most obviously the Verve and Oasis. The album escapes sounding tired and unoriginal only narrowly. Hawley, a past master when it comes to mastering the past, cleverly juxtaposes his crooner’s voice against the powerful, distortion-soaked backing, and it’s this combination that sounds new.
Few other singers could carry the faux-Indian dirge of ‘She Brings the Sunlight’, for instance, above cliché, but Hawley does, just. The cracking guitar solo certainly helps, adding a little spice at the end. It’s hard to think there isn’t a slight smirk going on behind the song’s gritty mysticism. There’s not a lot of ground covered in this song, or indeed the first half of the album, that wasn’t covered on Urban Hymns, but Hawley has age and gravitas on his side, and makes Richard Ashcroft’s treatment of a similar landscape sound decidedly youthful.
There’s a careful balance to Standing at the Sky’s Edge. Noise and weight gives way eventually to tenderness: ‘Seek It’ is truly beautiful, and wittily romantic (‘I had my fortune told and it said/ I would meet somebody with green eyes/ Yours are blue’). The smoke, threat and echo of the album’s first half are then painstakingly built back in during the next two songs, and Hawley sounds well ready for another go at hammer-and-tongs rhythm and groove by the time ‘Leave Your Body Behind You’ turns up, and gives him the chance. He delivers spectacularly, and it is this one and ‘Seek It’ that are the album’s greatest successes.
This album’s not quite a masterpiece: Hawley’s less convincing on the noisy ones than he is as when he’s whispering love at the microphone, but that’s hardly surprising, for a man whose back catalogue is a mine of the loveliest heartache. It’s a welcome change of direction, and a solid, connoisseur’s take on Britpop’s heavier moments. Hawley brands everything he touches with a dry, tobacco-scented class, and Standing at the Sky’s Edge is, in that sense, business as usual, but a bit louder.
THREE STARS
