Quantity alters quality. Ingest the second album from eight-piece Brooklyn ensemble Hem in small doses and the unencumbered listener may well find it beguiling, due in no small part to the vocals of Sally Ellyson, yet another pure voiced graduate of the Dusty school of delivery, a campus whose ranks are swelling by the day. She’s also complemented by string charts that echo Van’s swooning No Guru…, while the pedal steel whinges agreeably and the rhythm section keep their shirts tucked into their trousers. Hem have revised the 70s countrypolitan sound to include references to fellow Brooklyn buckos like Gershwin and Copland.
For sure, Dock Boggs never done it this way.
Polite to a fault, and it is a fault, Eveningland would make a palatable EP, but over 50 odd minutes starts to sound like a sexless, prim and proper interpretation of modern Americana that frequently strays into the excruciatingly twee (‘A-Hunting We Will Go’). Anyone expecting the exquisite avant-countryness of The Walkabouts will come away feeling gypped. If Gillian Welch can carry off the starched granddad shirt angle by dint of a Hawthorne-inherited puritan darkness, Hem are closer to buttoned-down collegiate revivalist folk, architects of the kind of adulterated roots music you’ll hear in the immaculately knick-knacked kitchens of lecturers, lawyers and self-professed intellectuals. It really takes a special sort of mediocrity to render Johnny and June’s ‘Jackson’ so innocuous.
This Hem’s cut way too low in the leg.