DISClosure: Graeme Downes - Hammers and Anvils

DISClosure
CD Reviews Of A National Scale

Graeme Downes
Hammers and Anvils

by Benjy Eisen

Given the chance, Hammers and Anvils could be the Nevermind of 2001 — the album that comes around once a decade, drops a bomb on modern rock radio, and a couple years later is attributed for launching an entire movement. Of course, that won’t happen with Hammers and Anvils. All I’m saying is that it’s conceivable. That’s how earth-shatteringly good this album is.

And nobody could’ve guessed it. In the 1980s, Graeme Downes formed the band The Verlaines in his homeland of New Zealand and submitted their first album as an assignment for an honors-level music class. It got an A. Shortly after Downes earned his Ph.D, he took a teaching position at the Institute of Technology in Auckland, New Zealand where he lectured on rock music. During his down time, he wrote and recorded the music that eventually became Hammers and Anvils.

Because of its academic approach, Hammers and Anvils shouldn’t be nearly as immediate as it is. Downes wrote and performed the entire album by himself, but apart from the guitars and the vocals, most of the instruments are either sampled or sequenced. And by his own account, the album was more of a music professor’s summer project than a bleeding-heart creative endeavor. Yet, for all their textbook-perfect craftsmanship, the emotional honesty of these songs gives them an undeniable realness. These are sharp, spiky ditties filled with lyrical wit and musical charm. The song “Cole Porter” sounds like it could be a head-on-straight companion piece to Syd Barrett’s Madcap Laughs, while tracks like “January Song” could easily have been cut out from a Bob Moses songbook. And then there’s the title track, which defies comparison altogether.

Overall though, this is not an album that reinvents the wheel. It’s literate, sometimes quirky, guitar driven pop music from New Zealand. Such music has been around since the eighties, often earning the nickname “kiwi rock.” Inventive or not, this is still somehow better than the rest. It’s refreshing in the same way that Radiohead was the first time you heard them, and every bit as enchanting. The most unexpected five-star album of the year.