Dan Haywood's New Hawks
Dan Haywood is an intrepid ornithologist, songwriter and country guitarist based in Lancashire. His expressive voice is genuinely idiosyncratic and his bold lyrics often name check his favourite fauna and are set in the windswept highlands. His band and songs are the New Hawks and they have no bass player – but they do have guitars, drums, violin, cello, bongos, gongs and other instrumentation including the pedal steel guitar of ex-Nashville country cat G.T. Thwaite.
The five tracks of this debut EP are part-ode to the wilds of Caithness and Sutherland and are one-part therapy, two-parts dementia that Dan himself describes as “upland cathartidelia”. They are in fact the first five parts of a twenty-nine piece song-cycle simply called ‘New Hawks’.
While there are elements of folk rock, this is no laid back excursion to country life but an inconstant tempo of almost vaudevillian drama as the words draw us in and the volume swoops up, then down and then up again. As far as influences are concerned, Dan lists Neil Young, Silver Jews and Lou Reed but there is also a more raw, traditional and yet psychedelic element to the New Hawks sound. Live performances by the band are always an intense and entertaining experience and have included supports for A Hawk And A Hacksaw and the Handsome Family.
>> Website: http://www.myspace.com/newhawks
>> MP3 audio file: kopper kettle
>> MP3 audio file: new wool