Hamish Hawk has the horn and he’s not afraid to let you know it. The Edinburgh born and based artist’s previous albums Angel Numbers (2023) and Heavy Elevator (2021) were made up of erudite songwriting ideal for the Morrissey fan in your life who was unable to chisel the art from the increasingly reactionary and tedious artist. However well crafted, both records perhaps suffered from an overabundance in lyricism – ‘Once Upon An Acid Glance’, for instance, was a curiosity shop impossible to enter thanks to a door jammed with references to “Tiffany interiors”, “Hockney ephemera”, Leonard Cohen, Dylan Thomas, Britt Ekland and “Grand delusions only fit for Napoleon” – arguably all a little much. The sleeve for Angel Numbers, whence the track came, featured a portrait of Hawk with his face blurred out, which rather sums up how the clever-clever epithets and dolorous romance tended to obscure the art, or a sense of the man who made it.
That has all changed, and dramatically so, on his third record. The title A Firmer Hand makes for a confident statement of intent on an album made harder, more honest, more brutal. Hawk has said that as he moves into his 30s, he decided that it was time to write a record that his parents wouldn’t necessarily be comfortable hearing. I think this is an important point when it comes to queer art. Having endured the writing of a memoir of the dark complexity of sexuality myself (cough Out Of The Woods, 2019, all good bookshops cough) I must admit I get a little weary with all the PR emails into my inbox that claim a record by an LGBTQI+ artist is “empowering” or about their “journey”, only for the lyrics and feel of the music not to match the claims. These projects are all undoubtedly well-meaning, but in their thin earnestness I rarely get a sense of the trauma and ecstasy of the long and never-ending process of coming out.
A Firmer Hand is such a thrilling listen because it eschews the platitudes of empowerment for something far more gritty, tough, self-critical – yet also unafraid to dish it out. It’s possibly not just Mr Hawk’s parents who might be advised to avoid this record, but from the sounds of the wonderfully waspish lyricism throughout, so might also music industry contacts, ex-lovers, friends and the sort of sexual acquaintances whose closing of the front door might be met with both a chuckle and a sigh of regret.
Hawk’s voice contains and conveys the self-liberation, the side-eye, the sauce. There’s a rough warmth to it that I didn’t find on the first two records, or when I first saw him live, at the 2023 edition of Sea Power’s Krankenhaus Festival. That’s all changed. In the joy of filth I hear The Hidden Cameras’ church praise group cum kink bangers LP The Smell of Our Own. In the sly lugubriousness, Stephin Merritt of The Magnetic Fields. Interestingly, it’s not just queer indie vocalists that these rich tones remind me of, as the confident gravel has more than a hint of Michael Gira around Swans’ masterpiece White Light From The Mouth Of Infinity. In contemporary terms, there is very few who sound like Hamish Hawk – perhaps Baxter Dury, if his sophisticate sheen dropped with his trousers in a woodland reach-around. All this goes to say that in the summer of 2024, A Firmer Hand feels fresh without needing to be entirely sonically original.
If Hawk’s first two records suffered from swirling rivers of vowels, consonants, nifty tics and couplets washing away the structure and architecture of the songwriting, this has been fixed here. His band’s focussed musicianship doesn’t merely sit as the undercoat for lyrical games, but by letting the rough trade in with a more garrulous, heavy approach, really pushes the voice and what is sung with it. So the title of ‘Juliet As Epithet’ might have you initially eye-rolling, but it’s such a graceful song, driven by a rhythm made of simple pops and a melodic pulse, Hawk’s voice teasing between regret and not caring at the failure of a relationship and the power games of sexual conquest. It’s understated panache just makes the clever lines land all the more powerfully – “I’m just the open secret no-one’s ever gonna blow” is a sliver of Carry On magnificence against the muddle of desire for a man “So goddamn handsome he makes me anxious / he holds my hand thru the sad advances.” There’s an instant flip from bottom to top in next track ‘Machiavelli’s Room’, a grand, gothic piece about an all-consuming sexual affair in which “I feared I was close to love / I felt him fit me like a glove” – giving both pleasure pain and the fragility of desire are commingled – “when he shrieks like a siren, I admire him / When he shrieks like a siren, I desire him”.
There’s an aggressive departure from the indie songwriter of yore throughout – ‘Big Cat Tattoo’ rolls with solid funk as it holds up both disdain for and admiration of some alpha male whopper. ‘Men Like Wire’ ought to be used an example of how to rewrite the indie rock banger and still make it sound exciting. ‘Nancy Dearest’, is a driving pop song that makes me think of both Franz Ferdinand’s ‘Michael’ and ‘Money For Nothing’-era Dire Straits, in the best possible way. ‘Autobiography Of Spy’ is slinky and suave, with guitar used for structural spikes as much as melody, and begs the question of why the duplicity of the agent’s life and closet sexuality hasn’t been more explored in song, given that Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt are such flipped icons in our cultural history. In ‘You Can Film Me’, Hawk seems to be addressing both a salacious older man wanting saucy pictures and his audience, both of whom want him “stripped back for cash”, both offering a temporary sense of selfhood in exchange for exposure. Where does it leave him, “hanging off the raggedy end of my age” – a great line that nails the anxiety of the later years of twinkdom, and the sense of being too old to make it as an artist.
This is a record that rips into masculinity in a way that’s been curiously absent from male artists of late. Hawk’s songwriting, sometimes arch and frequently ribald, reminds me of Hayden Thorpe and Tom Fleming from the dearly lamented Wild Beasts – there’s a similar pleasure in the double-entendre, the aside, a delight in the waspish mess of love and lust. Whether a heterosexual songwriter could write like this in the current climate is an argument for another time, but Hawk’s determination to go into the thorny side of ourselves here feels thrilling. As he put it in a recent interview with Loverboy magazine, A Firmer Hand is the sound of him exploring an “erotic heart, a lustful side, a desiring side, which by its very nature can be more animalistic, can be uglier, not violent exactly, but it’s not pure and smiley.”
