Hank

This is the era of the short attention span, as people who grew up with video games, MTV, and the infant stirrings of media saturation begin to take over and build a world that meets their quick-paced, multi-tasked expectations. I'm not yet sure what my cluttered mind makes of this yet-- as with anything, there's plenty of upside and corresponding downside. Regardless, we plunge forward into this new, fast world further every day, and there's lately been a surge in the number of albums that explode with song shrapnel, tossing ideas like brown rice and mixed vegetables and leaving further development to the imagination or later records.

Case in point is this Hank record, a sardine job that packs 15 songs into 28 minutes, slicing and dicing pop and punk songs and feeding them to a cheerleading competition. The Hank collective lurk somewhere in Toronto, a group of enthusiastically amateur female vocalists and instrumentalists swirling around a bearded Canadian guy called Cab who sings alternately with a kind of cockney sneer borrowed from late-70s English punk, an indie boy shout, and a country-ish baritone. What you'd call the overall result of this is up for some debate: "Spazz-pop" ignores the fact that there are bite-sized ballads in this mix, but it works for the uptempo songs, which constitute the majority, while other modern rock crit hyphenates all fall short on some account or another. Their are also dabs of early hip-hop, and the only thing I can really think of to compare it directly to is the Go! Team, though they're not as saturated or noisy as that band.

Hank's hodgepodge sonic jumble is full of wildly disparate elements-- a pounding kickdrum mixing it up with spluttering piano on one track; a jagged, disjointed guitars stabbed by buzzing bass on the next. Steadfastly unprofessional vocals act as the crazy glue that sticks everything together in a big, exuberant wad. As random and tangential as the album's flow is, though, it's obvious that it's a carefully designed trainwreck, sort of a Rube Goldberg deal where the train going off the tracks is just the first in a series of events that leads to an egg being cooked.

Take "The Earless", for example: Record scratching, violent glockenspiel, Cab's freaked-out cockney and the girls' loose harmonies look like a mess at first, but the way they come together undeniably makes for a bracing concoction. The song that follows, "Heswall Diesel", is comparatively straightforward and one of the album's best. A heavy, whomping beat, churning post-punk guitars and a crunching bassline lay down the attack while two-part female harmonies announce, "I'm going out to do some heavy petting." Unexpected pauses heighten the danceability of it, at least until it suddenly morphs into a depressive guitar dirge with a guy whispering "dead friends" over the top.

On the whole, this is a warped trip that deserves to bring some attention to Hank as the upstart provocateurs they seem to be. Of course, that's perhaps a bit complicated by the fact that the album was initially issued in a limited edition of 500, each of which had different artwork by Hank member Paige Gratland. Hopefully, they'll be trotting it out in a wider release soon so more people can get their hands on it, but for the meantime, it's a highly enjoyable if questionably sane statement of purpose.

-Joe Tangari, April 20, 2005 - Pitchforkmedia.com