Hallock Hill - The Union / A Hem of Evening (Double vinyl LP)

This is a lovely little package. It’s a gatefold 2LP with a sleek little book of pictures and poems and four sides of gently twisting guitar meditations from Tom “Hallock Hill” Lecky, which glide from awkward ambient backwards tinkerings to spiritual, spacious fingerpicking with dusky, evocative chords and fluid, delicate rhythms to layered and disorientating concordant thrum’n’chunter. As far as I can figure out, the first LP is his album ‘The Union’, on vinyl for the first time, and the second is his new record ‘A Hem of Evening’, which expands upon ‘The Union’’s musical themes.

I couldn’t tell you much about that from the perfunctory listen-through I’ve got time for in my hectic reviewing schedule but this is varied and skilled string-picking with an airy playfulness carving out wry, simple melodic shapes that spirit themselves away the moment you think you’ve got a grasp of them. Despite this fluid spontaneously composed style there’s always a focus and momentum to the gentle washes of notes.