Hangover Square - Rewire (2024) Hi-Res

Hangover Square are Bristol based husband and wife duo Victoria Bourne and Chris Harper; they create music that is a mix up of Americana, folk, blues, all with a gothic undertone. If you put All About Eve, Dead Can Dance and The Delines into a food mixer, then Hangover Square would be the sort of feast you would create.

The album, a follow up to their debut Painting With An Open Heart, has been two years in the making, and the time has been harrowing and redemptive: the duo became sober, suffered the loss of two friends to suicides and Bourne struggled with her own depression.

It’s an album that meshes electronica and acoustic instruments seamlessly, creating an intricate soundscape for Bourne’s expressive vocals. It’s an album where the love the artists feel for each other shines through, but never becomes mawkish.

Album opener, Softest of Silks, sets the tone with a slow build, like the band stretching and warming to the day ahead, the songs that will tell the tale. The guitar arpeggio is like rain hitting a drum, and the breathy vocals intone, almost accusingly, ‘How many times did your head leave your heart behind?’ Hold My Hand is a beautifully rendered love song, that conjures candles flickering, contemplation in the early hours, as a lonesome guitar picks out the notes. When You starts ominously then tunes up into a blues, almost Aboriginal sound, with a bottleneck guitar adding suspense.

There is a noir soundtrack feel to Thursday Redemption, as the sun rises slowly on a new day, scattering the night creatures, huddling, shimmering, as they search out their beds, to abandon the day to the sun walkers. It’s soulful. There’s an atmospheric feel to songs like Horizons, with its tropical sun drenched energy, and album closer Endearment which has a melancholic blues guitar playing under the lyrics that extol the belief that something must be given up to gain something. Both Gone and Grandcamp Maisy have an electronic, even psychedelic, folk essence to them

“When You” is one of those songs for which the usual generic tags and musical labels aren’t sufficient. It is music made beyond the scope of everyday music journalism, but I will try my best. Vocally, the song leans into blends of Eastern vibes and choral grandeur that immediately put you in mind of people like Lisa Gerard, both with Dead Can Dance and in her solo career, that same uniting of operatics and world music, classical and contemporary sounds, tradition and invention. But from a composition point of view, the use of vocal – often just as an instrument rather than a direct means of communication; it’s function to be heard, not understood, not in terms of language at least – reminds me of Karl Jenkins approach to such counterpoint.

But then, the music which drives these lush vocals comes from a different place altogether, when it is there at all. Bluesy guitar spirals and haunted country vibes are all that tether this song to the real world, and the result is a strange blend of East and West, the Occident meeting the Orient to create something global in its sonic scope, truly of, from and about this world.

Perhaps that is what world music actually is. Perhaps it is not a label to be attached to reappropriated regional music and borrowed cultural traditions; perhaps the term is better levelled at music that brings sonic strands from across the world together into something new, wonderfully unique, and truly culturally uniting—music like “When You.”