Review: Hemlock Shaw “I Danced All Night”

04 Feb 2014 — Josh Ginsberg

I Danced All Night, the new EP by New York experimental-pop musician Hemlock Shaw, is a penetrating suite of synthesized chamber music, composed for the flat, cold tones of an inexpensive keyboard’s orchestral voice bank. Just as 2013’s LP The Hell Under the Ground abandoned the freak-folk forms of its predecessor, 2012’s Tidal Tracks, I Danced All Night, Shaw’s first release since his relocation from Queens, New York to Edinburgh, Scotland, finds its auteur exploring a different idiom of songwriting and dressing his songs in a radically different garb. The recognizably synthesized timbres of the harps, organs and lyres that support Hemlock Shaw’s coos and bellows at once evoke the warmth of Romanticism and the strange digital remove of Nobuo Uematsu’s Final Fantasy scores. While the songs’ emphasis on rich chord progressions and twinkling arpeggios over percussion may seem to cast the EP’s title in an ironic light, the persistence of the songs’ intrinsic pulses produces motion in very much the same way that trance does. Hemlock Shaw’s latest is music to waltz or sway, better suited to a moonlit courtyard than a grimy club.

I Danced All Night’s greatest treasures reveal themselves when one attends closely to its lyrical musings on the body and the natural world. On opener “Down by the Grotto,” Shaw situates the inconceivable magnitude of nature within the intimately human when he describes a companion’s exhalation, so heavy with the scent of Clamato that it “smelled like a bay.” While this excerpt owes some of its success to the way Shaw enters into dialogue with eighteenth-century philosophers’ attempts to parse the Beautiful and Sublime, the singer’s comments on more pedestrian matters are just as resonant. The couplets of closer “Scepter” accomplish something truly remarkable as they manage to distill adolescent frustration and anxiety into a few lines without falling prey to any of the pitfalls that often mar reflections on youth. In the space of a few bars, his young speaker’s thoughts drift from wondering if his classmates would like him better if he were better dressed to wishing he “could wear wizard robes to school” so to get out of having to play basketball.

Listen to the dense riddle that is I Danced All Night below. But be careful not to slip (slip, slip) and kiss (kiss, kiss) Hemlock Shaw’s lips (lips, lips), for he warns that if you do, he’ll die and if that happens we might not have the pleasure of parsing the lusty Olympian’s next battle cry.