Saturday, September 30, 2017

Nate Hall- The Center of the Earth (Self Released)

Nate Hall is the guitar and singer in US Christmas, a US heavy space rock band. Although it has been some years since US Christmas had a new release, Nate has released a lot of stuff on bandcamp and a few smaller releases on tape and other formats. He has one official album under his name, which I really loved. He was recently in need of money so I splurged and bought the entire discography on bandcamp which included this new full length album. At the moment this is only available digitally but a CD release is in the works.  He album has 13 very diverse tracks.  Night sky Humming starts off with a beautiful track. Acoustic and electric guitars.  Purple sounds like Nate is playing a banjo. This is a very slowly picked track. Nice and short instrumental. Bitter World of Dreams combines electric and acoustic guitars as most of the tracks on this album. Holy Spirit is a sort of tormented sound with a powerful electric guitar complimenting the acoustic guitar and lyrics. Winter Fingers is a slow and beautiful number and one of my faves on the record.  Because they are Strange features some sampled words by an Indian chief and is a dreamy experimental track that leads into the title track, The Center of the Earth, which features the banjo. Always is a strange drone experiment track with some a dark trippy feel to it, the way the vocal sits inbetween the drony parts.  Wet to slip this Skin features electric guitar and a pretty straight vocal. A solo is overdubbed after the vocal section, which returns afterwards. Circling Fall is back to acoustic guitar and electric and a nice laid back vocal that is double tracked or is that someone else??  Til the waves has a nice multilayerd and spacey vibe to it and some electric slide guitar with some delays along with the strummed acoustic guitar. Love the singing on this one. If you like his other material, you will enjoy this. Nate is true to his style but also not afraid to step out of the box and do something strange and unexpected.

Recorded and Mixed in August 2015 by Travis Kammayer at Fahrenheit Studio, Johnson City, Tennessee . Words and music by Nate Hall. Additional sounds by Travis Kammayer . Sampled words of Chief Dan George/Thomas Berger. Mastered by Brad Boatright/Audioseige. Art by Hush

http://natehall77.bandcamp.com

1 comment:

  1. Just got this on CD the other day. Thanks for the review

    ReplyDelete