Ben de Hoedt – The Gentle Northern Wind – Album Review
As gothically evocative as bats exiting an abbey, this release by Melbourne musician Ben de Hoedt is more shade than light, a widescreen series of carefully crafted vignettes. Acoustic guitar and voice advance open-ended narratives, while time signatures and keys modulate frequently, tickling the intellect as an old-fashioned wooden puzzle box might. Listening brings to mind a quiet poker game for higher stakes than intended, the characters anonymous and distant. Songs barely ever repeat their component sections shot for shot, instead advancing with subtle additions. There is often space in the self-played and produced recording, and only on subsequent listens do the vectors of the songs crawl out into view.
Also previously in the now defunct high-concept prog (original 1970s definition of the word) project Indians To Heaven, as well as The Cancer Foundation, de Hoedt’s craft has deepened and solemnised over time.
Don Bartley’s mastering recommends a higher quality than a bandcamp stream listen can muster, the frequently dynamic guitars and drums notably coming alive. This record is very far away from compressed radio sludgy hits, and it takes a patient but rewarding session to take in all the electric guitar vibrato, the foley effects, the african percussion textures.
“The Man Knows How to Dance” – with crisp acoustic guitar, non-traditional chord changes and atmospherically unsettling guitar washes, this is folk music for children under dictatorship. You can imagine each taking turns with percussion flourishes around the room. The mood of the record is intimate, like conversation in code, and is indebted to concept-driven music chewed over with furrowed brow on dusty vinyl recordings from Robert Wyatt to early Genesis. What would be be more intimate, indeed, than an electric guitar strummed with no amplification, as the opening of “The Gift Of Death.”
“The Last One Standing” almost lets the tension loose as the drums push into a freer downhill charge at 3:20, but the relief is short lived. Death seems to be lurking at the corners of this song, in fact most of the project overall. Note the cover image by Melissa B. Tubbs which features a skeletal figure on a prancing white horse, a pied piper. Is he perhaps luring the rats/people to their doom, especially those who feel they need to meet their retribution? A crow bends forward attentively from its perch as one of the followers appears to faint with the weight of the music. The epic song does provide respite again towards its conclusion, Jenna Stamp lending sympathetic warmth to the outro.
I wonder who the intended audience is for this record, which has all of the intricacy and harmonic tension of black metal, without growls or much distortion. Could that audience be convinced to engage, or will the need for viking thunder render this too finespun an offering? Fans of King Crimson and the UK’s Canterbury Scene will find a lot to love here, with invention and curious progressions never far away, though you don’t always get talking about those scenes down your average Australian watering hole. In that case, the record, and all of its care and mollydooker charm needs to find its way to the UK and Europe.
You can find this album on bandcamp.
Full disclosure: In the year 2001 I was in a band with Ben called The American Public.
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