 A
new song titled "Undone" has been added to the myspace
page. You can download it for free Here!
Dates for the Fall tour of Holland have been posted with more to
come.
Six Black Birds was selected as a top 3 finalist in the
Indie Acoustic Project’s “Best CDs of 2007” awards
in the Alt Country category.
For
more info check out:www.indieacoustic.com
IMA FINALISTS ANNOUNCED!
Thousands of submissions from Australia to Zimbabwe have been reviewed
and the Finalists for this year's IMA program have been announced.
Nathan has been chosen as a finalist for the 2007 Independent Music
Awards! His song "Teeth" from his latest
album "Six Black Birds" was one of five finalist
in the Americana song category.
Six Black Birds makes Texas Music Magazines Top 5 Cd's
of 2007!
"Simply put, a revelation...snarls and sighs with swaggering
conviction worthy of McMurtry and Escovedo at their best."
- Richard Skanse
On the Corner Music, is proud to announce the release of SIX
BLACK BIRDS, the new album from Austin singer songwriter
Nathan Hamilton. It has been five years since his last studio
album and fans will agree that this record was well worth the wait.
This is a very different Nathan Hamilton than
the one who came away from 2000's Kerrville Folk Festival with New
Folk honors. With the adoption of a denser sound, stylistically
closer to indie rock than to the Americana he is generally known
for, Nathan gives the listener a record more intense than his previous
efforts. The album was recorded and mixed in Austin,Tx in six days
and was co-produced by Darwin Smith & Erik Wofford at Cacophony
Studios (Voxtrot, The Black Angels, Okkervil River).
There they captured the live energy of Hamilton and his great band,
with Billy Brent Malkus(Texas Sapphires, Mondo Generator) on
lead guitar, Chepo Pena(Sincola, David Garza) on bass and
Adam Tyner(Rockland Eagles) on drums. The songs are
by turns smoldering and incendiary, while others openly combust
into powerful, hard driving anthems.
SIX BLACK BIRDS is not so much a stylistic
departure as it is a complete artistic evolution. Fans may be a
bit shocked at the change at first, but with each listen they will
be wonderfully surprised.
THE LATEST REVIEWS:
Nathan
Hamilton
SIX
BLACK BIRDS (On
the Corner Music 2007)
In
a word, damn.
Austin's Nathan Hamilton was always “good”- good in the way you
would hope any singer-songwriter with a Kerrville New Folk win to
their name would be. But who knew he could be great ?
That's not meant as a backhanded compliment; it's just a
real (and welcome) kick in the butt when an artist you think you've
got all sized up throws you off guard by quietly releasing a record
that rocks on the level of Six Black Birds. “Even the sweetest
of saints/show their teeth sometimes,” Hamilton sings on “Teeth”-
a perfect metaphor for the album's secret weapon: Billy Brent Malkus,
the Texas Sapphires guitarist whose jagged leads lend the whole
record a bite worthy of James McMurtry's Heartless Bastards.
But Hamilton's songs here cut just as deep, and when all the elements-
killer rhythm section and B3 included- lock together perfectly on
the title track or for the album's five minute, gear grinding, tour
de force centerpiece, aptly titled “The Cut”, the result wrecks
unholy hell on your CD or MP3 player's repeat button. Of
course, not every track here carries the same undeniable swagger;
some of them take a stealthier approach. But the tension
never lets up until the very end. By the time Six Black Birds winds
down to its closing grace note, the acoustic guitar strum and quietly
reflective tone of “Hanging On” feels like a deep sigh after surviving
a thrilling knife fight.
- Richard Skanse Texas Music Magazine
"Blistering
indie-folk crossover"
Hamilton makes a glorious racket, a sort of indie-folk
with guitars careening around like a six-string mosh-pit... What
is great about these songs is that whilst you hear echoes of other
bands (Jason & the Scorchers, Buzzcocks, Pixies, Richard Buckner)
the dominant personality is all Hamilton's.
This
is a well-balanced set - he doesn't rely too much on any one element.
He's just managed to arrange everything into the correct pattern
and what a pattern. Just sit back listen and watch this one go.
Monday, March 05, 2007
-
David Cowling for Americana UK
"... Nathan
has always gone back and forth easily between the rock and folk
camps. He did, you may recall, win the Kerrville New Folk award
in 2000. But, as if to erase any doubt about which side of the fence
he’s now on, Six Black Birds jumps out of the gate with a
straight rocker, “Sooner or Later.” This song displays
some beautiful guitar work, and the subtle, but unusual, background
instrumentation makes me think that Nathan may be exploring new
ground with this record. And he is. The second tune, “Enough,”
features strong percussion as the primary musical accompaniment
to Nathan’s haunting vocal. “Teeth” then takes
us back to straight rock. It has a subtle organ backtrack and gives
us Nathan’s best guitar hook since Tuscola’s “Two-Penny
Vengeance.” But lets stop right there. I don’t want
to do a tune by tune breakdown. Instead, let me answer a few questions
that may have arisen in your mind about this record. Is this a different
kind of Nathan Hamilton album? Yes, it is. If you’ve been
a Nathan Hamilton fan, though, and followed his solo career, been
to his live shows, you had to expect this was in him. Musically
it’s quite different from his previous releases, but lyrically
it’s really an expansion and extension the broader themes
he began exploring in All for Love and Wages. Is there any sign
of the folk-y Nathan Hamilton on this record? Hell yeah! In “Green
& Gold” Nathan sings: "I saw a broken, black umbrella,
just like a fallen newborn bird. Lying in the street, just as useless
as a song gone unheard." Nathan the poet is alive and well.
Musically, the album’s last song, “Hanging On,”
is a beautiful acoustic number. There is a longer than normal gap
between the previous song and “Hanging On,” as if to
signal that it should be considered a stand-alone. Perhaps he put
it on there to show his more laidback fans that he hasn’t
totally abandoned his folk roots. What’s the best song on
the record? That’s always a hard one to answer, because it
really takes many listens over time for the songs to age properly,
but, gun to my head, if I’m picking just one, it’d be
“Teeth.” It’s the kind of song that I think will
still sound as fresh ten years from now as it does today. Six Black
Birds is Nathan Hamilton with attitude. In “The Cut”
he explains: "I don’t mean to be so angry. Truth be told,
I am just scared. Lashing out at anybody That has the bad luck of
being there." I can’t say I felt “lashed out at,”
but Six Black Birds grabbed me from the first guitar lick and didn’t
let me go until the last note almost forty-five minutes later. And
then it left me wanting more.
- Steve Circeo for Texas Music Times
Nathan Hamilton's first album in 2000 was undoubtedly Texas-roots
country, but the soulful songwriter's fourth CD titled Six Black
Birds has shifted into the rock realm.
“I did actually tell the band ‘No twang' on the first
day in the studio,” Hamilton said. “ I knew that I would
be drawing a line in the sand for many people with this record.
If you listen to it back-to-back with my first record Tuscola, then
it sounds like a drastic shift. However, for those who have been
coming to the live shows in the last few years, they should not
be too surprised.”
It is Hamilton's first studio album in five years.
While satisfying the urge for something new, the album still is
classic Hamilton with his deep and reflective songwriting. The
CD has the insightful and vivid lyrics that Hamilton is known for
— such as “While they're offering you riches/they'll
be stealing your ass blind” from “Teeth” —
coupled with the raw, aggressive sound of his band, No Deal. Hamilton
swings between a country sound with the folk tunes he is known for
when playing solo and a heavier or indie rock feel when he's with
the band.
“Musically and sonically, I was partly drawing on earlier
influences and bands I was listening to in high school like the
Teardrop Explodes, the Replacements and Lloyd Cole and the Commotions.
I also have been influenced a lot in the last few years by many
of the Euro-pop bands like the Frames, Radiohead and Elbow,”
he said. Hamilton also credits influences from his band members
— all of whom have played in punk bands — and called
this album “a natural progression and not a calculated choice.”
The title track is commanding and abrupt, and is reflective
of the entire album that Hamilton calls a “slow burn.”
“Frame to Finish” shows the softer side of the album.
A slower love song, it shows the range of Hamilton's writing ability
while offering up smooth, but not weak, harmonies and accompaniments.
With Billy Brent Malkus's guitar riffs and Hamilton's powerful lyrics,
“Burn” is like a call to arms, protesting corporate
America.
The album wraps up with the lone acoustic track “Hanging On,”
a slow, rhythmic ballad played solo but as rich as the other nine
songs.
With Six Black Birds, Hamilton shows, he's grown more complex and
evolved as a singer and songwriter. He this album is his most personal.
.‘The Cut' is probably the most personal song I have ever
written. Many times in a song, even if I am singing in first person,
it is still about someone else. In that one, I am not hiding behind
a character at all,” Hamilton said.
- Amanda
Reimherr 210 SA
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