It’s funny how serendipity works. The day after I referenced The Blitz Kids – that short-lived, massively influential, fashion-driven post-punk London club scene – when reviewing “Needle,” I found leading light Steve Strange‘s autobiography in a second-hand bookshop. This, in turn, led me to play a lot of the music of that moment. Sat between the Bowie-obsessed DJs of those club days and the New Romantic bands who took the sound overground were bands whose creative echoes can be heard in Hot Hail!‘s sound.
I’m not saying that Hope in Hell is in any way riding the coattails of what has gone before; this is no exercise in nostalgia or excuse to dig up past glories, but I bet you would find bands like Visage, Ultravox, and early Spandau Ballet in Billy Sigil’s record collection. But everything is influenced by something, and name-dropping such bands is not a criticism, rather a comment on his great taste in music.
“Commitment” has a touch of Soft Cell about it, that same ability to sound like chamber-pop run through the digital world, a blend of understated groove and anthemics, and, lyrically, full of dry wit, dark wisdom, and a killing joke punchline that’s very Almond-esque.
“Article of Faith” better explains this clever combination of tipping the hat and forward thinking; its liquid sonics are less about replicating earlier sounds and more about emulating what those pioneers might be doing today if they were starting and had access to today’s tech.
The title track is drenched in melancholy, in understatement, a slow dance across the neon-washed dancefloor as the sun comes up and the house lights flicker on, and “Joy” is an infectious groover, proof that while Billy Sigil is great at the torch song, they are also equally expert at filling the dancefloor.
Everything is cyclical, and so with nearly fifty years between those heady days and this fantastic album, it feels perfectly natural to have those memories conjured. But, as I said earlier, this is not someone looking backward, well, maybe a few fleeting glances, this is the sound of someone helping to define the sound of the future, and, on the strength of Hope in Hell, the future sounds like an exciting place to be.
Discover more from Dancing About Architecture
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
