Sitting Targets

by

Peter Hammill

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"And now, for my big hit!" pronounced Hammill and smiled, before he played "Sitting targets" (the song). It was in Tel Aviv, 1985, and all us in the audience - not more than 300 - laughed with him. Hammill and hits? get outa here!! Anyway,"Sitting targets" is a metal album, that probably influenced by Gary Numan, and other artists of the late 70s. Synthesizers and drum machines took some of the humanity of Hammill. I missed the piano, the drum and the bass guitar. Only the saxes of David Jackson were around in a few songs. But still - listen to the gentle "Ophelia" and "Stranger still". The remarkable description of crisis between lovers in "My experience" and "Sitting targets", and the desperation in "What i did". Hammill was always great in painting sad pictures from everybody's life or nightmares. All the people who read his lyrics, find themselves there. This is Hammill, and "Sitting targets" is another good album of his.

In what must be Hammill's "middle period", somewhere between "Chameleon" and "What, Now", some interesting tendencies begin to surface. Instead of album titles, albums tend to use a track title. Odd, that, because this naming style imparts such a different feel to whatever is summarized under the title. In this case, the title song, "Sitting Targets", is yet another call to personal responsibility, condensed in scale and scope to fit a "songs" format. The metaphors here and throughout the album seem simple and take on a surface gloss: the road is life, the car is an isolating shell, even if we think we're safe, we really aren't, etc., etc. The music has a terrific, home studio sound: raw, unpolished with wildly tweaked EQ. The playing is adequate, but never informed by the extremes of his earlier work.

And now, something interesting happens, at least to my perception of Hammill's style. From the perspective of his very recent work, the early solo work was bathed in deeper degrees of abstraction and what seemed to be earnest, raw emotion in the vocal delivery. Here the writing and singing begin to sound less earnest and more theatrical. Meaning that over-the-top, heavy technique demanded by the traditional theatre. Practiced for effect, and telegraphed rather than inferred. The style that once seemed intrinsic and authentic, now seems heavily rehearsed and staged. All this transmits a tangible degree of brittleness and artificiality to the whole experience. There are some terrific riffs, some beguiling instrumental and vocal processing and treatments - Hammill's "Sonix" perhaps begin this period, but that's a whole different subject.

"Sitting Targets" is in many ways a very worthwhile recording. Compared to most of the catalog here on Amazon, I'd take it in a heartbeat. Compared with Hammill's own library, it's simply a transitional step. Enough to say that what once came from the heart here comes from the mind, and many many times the heart has proven to be the wiser.