H. Hawkline - Milk For Flowers [LP]

On H. Hawkline's fifth solo album, beauty flourishes in the corners of grief's desecrated church; jewelling the cobwebs, gilding the dust, and making a relic of it's creator's arrow-shot heart. Brought to being in Huw Evans's hometown of Cardiff, the writing of Milk for Flowers served as the outlet for several dances with the violence of life - a spate of significant events which took his "spectrum of emotion and experience suddenly widescreen". Where 2017's I Romanticize and 2015's In the Pink of Condition might be thought of as dadaist art objects - feeling and meaning obfuscated by the absurd - Milk For Flowers belongs firmly in the realm of the divine; not only for the auspices, saints, and holy bakers that populate it's lyrics, but also for it's exquisite torment; the gateway to a newfound profundity of voice. "I'm not so good at showing vulnerability and I think that's why, in the past, there's been a tendency to obscure or make abstract any real emotion, either lyrically or musically" Evans reflects. "I think this was most apparent with the way I sang, keeping everything as flat and emotionless as possible. It was impossible to do any of those things with this album: I had to sing." Milk for Flowers is at once visceral and enlightened, it's soundscapes verdant yet delicately rendered. With this latest, most intimate work, H. Hawkline beautifully bares his blood, bones and soul. And quietly, along with the entrails and rubble held in Milk For Flowers' reliquary, there hides a small, green kernel of life; hope, perhaps, that today's decay might nourish tomorrow's blooms.