Staff Reviews

Hopewell - Good Good Desperation

Review by Dom Gourlay

Despite having been active for a good decade, releasing four albums and several EPs along the way, Brooklyn quintet Hopewell are still something of an unknown quantity outside of their own backyard...»

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hopewell has never been a band too concerned with classification. for more than a decade, they have been at turns ornate, primitive, fired up, lashing out, beautiful, burly, blue, white hot, sardonic and sweet. and through an impressive amalgam of talent and a knack for twisting the component parts of the rock era's most inventive music, they have concocted studio works that evade description and sink hooks in grey matter few other bands find. for any listener who has tracked the arc of hopewell's output, their arrival at this particular convergence of studio/song architecture and lead-heavy rocking, makes perfect freaking sense. their first three lp's were beautiful sonic traffic jams that spanned the psych-glam of ziggy stardust bowie and janes addiction, tattered, heartworm, heavy mountain jams, and a mad scientist's approach to production that evoked images of dr frankenstein and george martin playing 3-d chinese checkers in the depths of abbey road. john peel himself took note, gave them a session of their own and the press took notice. they hot the road and played with just about everybody - most recently (and heroically) opening for the hyperdecibeled hydra that is my bloody valentine. good good desperation is a chameleon of the most sincere, beautiful and rocking sort - the sum of a decade long exploration swirled through the funnel cloud of atom heart mother, ege bamyasi, odyssesy & oracle and nothing's shocking, and broadcast through a mind meld of five remarkable musicians - this is an album of head music that will keep your own shape-shifting mind wandering, shaking and shimmying long after that first sonic swat upside the head.
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