"Consequences" is an album that grows with each listen, over the years, subtly, slowly—or at least that's how it has happened for me—so much so that I consider it Hammill's best album of the third millennium and even his finest since 1986, from the time of the beautiful "And Close As This." Just the opening track, "Eat My Words, Bite My Tongue," would be enough to justify the price of the album, but as you delve deeper, you discover a truly high concentration of inspiration, in an album that is sometimes challenging, hermetic, sparse in arrangements, and rich especially in harmonies and vocal overdubs, while piano and guitar (the album is entirely composed, performed, and arranged by Hammill alone) serve as essential accompaniments, in a work of great expressiveness, intimacy, and rawness without entirely relinquishing the dramatic theatricality for which it is known. Only great songs abound (I mention "Scissors" and its final two explosive minutes of electric guitar, the star here, distorted and biting) and a masterpiece among the most beautiful and intense of his career: "A Run of Luck," the ultimate expression of the most desolate and somber Hammill, a bard of loneliness and resignation. A spine-chilling piece. The album is a near masterpiece, and it's not something everyone can pull off in 2012, with already 45 years of career behind them.
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