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NBHAP Rating: 4,2/5
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[one_half last=”yes”]HUSKY
Ruckers Hill
Release-Date: 10.04.2015
Label: Subpop
Tracklist:
01. Ruckers Hill
02. St. Joan
03. Heartbeat
04. For To Make A Lead Weight Float
05. I’m Not Coming Back
06. Mirror
07. Arrow
08. Wild And Free
09. Fats Domino
10. Leaner Days
11. Drunk
12. Gold In Her Pockets
13. Deep Sky Diver
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Natural development
Ruckers Hill is HUSKY‘s second record- a fact you can definitely not deny. It seems like the band matured a lot: ever single track bespeaks deepness, thought-outness and in its own way a certain catchiness. It took the Australian lads three years to get to the point of releasing their sophomore record, a time which often hasn’t been easy for them, as singer and mastermind Husky Gawenda says: ‘The first album was hard but this was really hard. Albums are difficult to make.’ But during listening to Ruckers Hill you would never assume that the band had any problems whilst writing and recording the 13 songs – the melodies float easily and confident forward and Gawenda intonates them with such an emotionality like he had never done anything else in his life.
Home
To find inspiration for his songs, Gawenda meandered through the streets of his hometown Collingwood in Melbourne, went to the same café every morning to grab a coffee and read some pages of Leonard Cohens novel Beautiful Losers. Most of the time, he had been alone. Moreover, the album is named after Ruckers Hill, a place in Northcote, Melbourne. These circumstances are tangible in the music: folk tunes are combined with restrained melancholic melodies and a high degree of nostalgia.
Retrospection
HUSKY‘s second record assembles fragments of Gawenda’s past. Ruckers Hill- which is also the name of the album’s first song– is not only any spot in Melbourne, it’s much more a place where the band’s frontman used to live. He sings the lines: ‘My home is calling me/ back to the quiet streets’ with such a sad and heart-touching timbre in his voice that you also have to think of certain moments of your past which transfer you in a tearful state of mind because you know that these instants are over and won’t ever come back again. Ruckers Hill isn’t the only song which goes directly in your heart and drives goose bumps on your skin. Actually, almost all of them do. There’s for example the first single from Ruckers Hill called I’m Not Coming Back which combines sensitive lyrics like ‘My hometown has cursed me/lately/ I’m not coming back’ with melancholic alternative folk melodies and a deep tenderness or the emotional Deep Sky Diver which is about a close friend of Gawenda’s who has been desperately in trouble.
With their second record Ruckers Hill Australia’s HUSKY proves that they are a mellow band which is able to create profound music which goes straight into your heart.
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