Paul Hawkins & Thee Awkward Silences – The Bigger Bone

Some singles beguile you, whisper in your ear, suggest that you might like to come up and see them some time, slip into something more comfortable and get to know them better. And then others just lunge at you from the loudspeakers, arms outstretched, shoving an orange into your mouth with one hand while slipping a noose around your neck with the other. Thus it is with The Bigger Bone, which is indeed so much BIGGER and more attention-grabbing than anything else I’ve listened to recently.
Its constituent parts aren’t particularly unique: a nuclear bassline, trippy keyboards, itchy-scratchy sheet-metal guitar, crashing cymbals and desperate vocals. But its cavernous, black treacle sound is completely arresting – not to mention beautifully produced, with all elements clearly distinct. There’s no let-up with the second track, which builds from the restrained, suspense-laden repetition of “hoping for a saviour, hoping for a cure” into a psychotic, pounding, jackhammer marching song.
The third track is a bit like a glam rock stomp with a migraine, but it seems to be the most positive of the three – a rebuttal of negativity in which Hawkins addresses an unspecified protagonist with the defiant sentiment that “I won’t let you tell me hate is all around.” There’s a lot going on beneath the surface of this song: cherubic backing vocals, guttural whispers and the gradually building insistence that “I came out of the darkness, I came into the light.”
Doing a little background reading, I discover that it seems to be customary to compare Hawkins to Nick Cave and Tom Waits. This does him a huge disservice: he’s a considerably more marginal and interesting figure than these two decidedly mainstream oddballs. A better comparison would be Vinny Miller, who released an album of discordant, Cro-Magnon swamp blues on 4AD Records just over three years ago and has since gone to ground.
Part of the UK’s antifolk scene, Hawkins is a determined individualist whose work with friends Thee Awkward Silences reminds me at times of the visceral rock of Iggy Pop and the unorthodox worldview of Karl Blake. I hope that his uncompromising material receives the greater exposure that it deserves. If this is what he sounds like on record, God only knows what his live performances are like. I’ll be keeping a keen eye on his tour schedule and am prepared to risk my hearing to find out.
http://www.myspace.com/theeawkwardsilences
http://www.paulhawkinsmusic.co.uk/
http://www.drownedinsound.com/bands/9559
This review also appears in issue 3 of DrunkenWerewolf magazine.