Tim Hort always manages to offer us something more than it seems, at least more than it appears on the first spin. It would be easy to pass this off as, broadly speaking, rootsy retro rock, or even to use the ubiquitous, almost meaningless label of the moment, dark Americana, but to do so would show that the author had not been listening properly, certainly not deeply enough.
No, there is a lot more going on here than you think. The opener, “July Island,” is a brooding, beat-heavy rocker, but one that works its magic through subtlety and melody rather than volume or velocity—an outstanding balance of deftness and drive. By contrast, “Dissolve” is a melancholic ballad, one that evolves from delicate riffs into a gorgeously considered soundscape, its atmospheres held together by swampy digital beats. It’s like nothing you’ve heard before.
“Chain and Sky” is a singer-songwriter ballad that builds a cocoon of intrigue with the washes and waves of sonics that ebb and flow through it, the song often seeming caught in its undertow before finding a channel into more serene waters.
And by the time you get to “Spies in the House” and its strange blend of understatement and anthemics, you realize that you have passed through so many sonic compass points, some indicating genre, others pointing towards geography, some demarcating eras, and others pointing to places on the map marked only with labels such as “parts unknown,” liminal spaces between the genres.
Even better is the fact that the more you play Famine, the more it reveals these hidden gems, the more spins you give it, the more rewarding the experience.
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