Artist: Hangman’s Chair
Title: Saddiction
Type: Album
Label: Nuclear Blast
French group Hangman’s Chair are a band who, had it not been for my previous role as reviewer at Ave Noctum, I probably never would have come across. Which would have been a tragedy for this near twenty year old band. I was often the one who picked up the neglected albums, the ones who no one else wanted or the utterly unclassifiable stuff because frankly I would give anything a go (I once found myself enjoying a recording of those radion ‘number stations’ set to ambient music because of that…) outside of a couple of no-go areas that I generally dislike so much I couldn’t fairly review it – metalcore, slam, post-black metal…
Hangman’s Chair were, and happily are, not easy to wedge into a pigeonhole. But the areas they stalk are. Opener of their sixth album here, ‘To Know The Night’, has a riff that immediately harks back to pre- ‘Long Cold Distance’ Katatonia. The vocals when they come are superb, full of desperation and pain and the the hook of this song slides in like a needle, and the damage done. There’s a feel to the guitars and the riff though that is somehow rooted in stoner/psyche and the use of keyboards and the melody has shades of gloom rock bastards Jack Frost. The bass lines often delve into goth, that dark but pulsing sound. It’s a heady brew, and casts images of harsh flats, peeling walls, low light and a night that starts with bad chemicals and can only get worse.
The other thing I’ve found about Hangman’s chair is how easily it is for their songs to utterly engulf you. One is never enough, you have to breathe deep and inhale the whole album.
But this is not …. well as an earlier album noted ‘This Is Not Supposed To Be Positive’ In fact it is grim and hopeless. A track like ‘In Disguise’ begins with really the kind of dark ambient you find on the Dim Lights album ‘Starspire’ (see here) before moving into a breathy song half looking for hope, half making excuses and yet finding neither. It is an album of ‘2 AM Thoughts’, that strange, liminal space where trying to numb yourself with alcohol instead you finally realise that you cannot drink to forget because this is where the memories return unbidden slipping through the cracks in your broken wall. You drink to remember.
Full of hollow indeed.
‘Neglect’ is a song almost drifting away, only brought back by those insistent questions. Final song ‘Healed?’ is nothing of the kind but somewhere in there, in these endless folding and refolding waves of haunting guitar and torn vocals, there is that last spark. The hand still holding on. “Forget everything, forget everything and run….Face everything, face everything and rise. ‘Til you’re healed…”
This album, this band, is almost unremitting despair, sadness, grief. The lights are always single bulbs, the shadows flicker. But something in there still lives. Something so deep in the humanity of it all refuses to let go. Almost twenty years mastering their non-genre, they are always the smoothest of rough rides, like sinking into a warm bath and feeling the pain seep into the water. They do not heal, but they do share and that sometimes is what you need to know. You are not alone.
An absolute masterclass.
Gizmo
Walking The Liminal Space 