Peter Hammill
Consequences

The approach to this album was very suspicious and wary, almost as if I didn't want to get involved, trying to remain as detached as possible, and I must say that the first listens of the album were almost like climbing a mountain where at every difficulty and further slope you feel like giving up and stopping, and instead, no, stubbornly you try to reach the end looking for a reason to justify these non-songs, discordant, that seem to have no melody, that chase each other on sparse guitar chords and piano where the voice does not rest on them, like in classic songs, but detaches almost as if to throw stones at the heart and soul of the listener. But then, casually and without even wanting to, like the satori after seemingly disconnected koans, a key is found among the dissonances, and a door suddenly opens, and at that precise moment, it's as if the entire meaning of that sound were crystal clear and shining with light.....

Guiding me as I listen to this new hammillian masterpiece amidst the deserted streets and just trembling lights fading into the night and the arrival of the new day's clarity, is the perfect osmosis between guitar and voice in All the Tiredness (the sixth track of the CD), which surprises me almost as if I were in a Wenders film, while driving along the desolate roads of a new dawn but strong with sweet remembrances....
The subtle peculiarity of this 'Consequences' is as if it were an album hiding behind a sort of transparent curtain where everything seems the same as the usual old latest Peter but if you then gently blow over the veil, you discover wonders and different facets, rich in plays and shades where behind the apparent sparse but distinct sound, dense with a delicate and soft-spoken lyricism, very attentive in the choral arrangements of the voices, where even the pauses are music and where the bursts of piano and guitars, when they erupt, do so fully and impetuously but without distortion and with the awareness of knowing where to go and where to arrive.

It's difficult to find comparisons with Hammill's previous works; perhaps due to the lyrical sense and intimate solitude that hovers over the album, 'And close as this' immediately comes to mind, maybe richer in melody, while in 'Consequences' the musical score is more varied and colorful, and we find songs almost in the style of a songwriter like Lou Reed or reminiscent of Nick Cave's 'The Road', where the vagabondism of going aimlessly towards unknown places is more a vagabondism of the soul seeking itself amidst doubts and certainties, amidst poignant abatements,  among long contortions and brief slashes of clarity, where the frontiers crossed aren't left behind and can then return like a mocking maze, and intoxicated by this ecstatic travail of the spirit where   one witnesses, even for the totally self-made, the triumph of the loneliest and most introspective Hammill... ever more so...