Released back in August, Felix Hatfield’s third album, House Of The Artist, recently came to the top of our pending pile and it’s a shame that we didn’t get our act together at the time to salute it. Having said that, he’s not touring the album and it’s as available now as when it was released so, have a read and then go out and buy it. You won’t be disappointed.
Hatfield is probably best described as an “outlier” these days. He paints and makes films alongside his music, music which might be considered as “primitive” given its home made patina and the somewhat ramshackle approach to melody and rhythm. He’s akin to the likes of Michael Hurley, another songwriter who also paints and who finds inspiration in the old time music of America. In addition, Hurley and Hatfield can conjure magic in the most humdrum of affairs, witness Hatfield’s song T-Shirt on this album. It’s almost a dirge, the instruments wheezing and puffing as Hatfield drily relates the fallout from a broken relationship, “I’ve been there, I’ve done that, I’ve got the T-Shirt” he sings.
He opens the album with the croaky homespun wisdom of Somethin That I Know, a song which goes around in circles, alluding perhaps to gossip. Whatever it is that he or they know and don’t know is never explained. Lemon Rinds is more straightforward, albeit in a strange and quizzical way, as Hatfield, an outsider from the start (I left the theatre during E.T., I couldn’t handle the corn scene), offers advice to those who find the world not easy to take, adopting the late Oregon blues player Eagle Park Slim’s motto, There Ain’t No Time For Hope and ending with “I think we can agree that life is pink and purple with strife.” This sense of optimism is then replaced by the desolate Weepin Willow, an intimate wail of a song.
Hatfield, amidst his primitivism, has always been acute when writing about relationships and this is brought to the fore on the halting, and quite lovely, lost love song, You Said You Loved Me. Sounding like Jim Reeves coming across the ether via a Ouija board this is miserabilism at its best. Bound To Lose (Sleep) finds Hatfield in thrall to a partner with whom he made love to after tripping out on Hieronymus Bosch books, the pair of them revelling in their garden of delights. A rudimentary and scratchy guitar rings throughout a portrait of a formidable companion on Joan, a woman who “doesn’t give a fuck” while the closing, title song, comes across as possibly autobiographical as Hatfield describes his safe space as “a workshop…the house…a graveyard of visions where heartbreaks reminisce.”
Despite the off kilter approach here, Hatfield’s songs are immersive and quite moving, akin to the likes of Will Oldham, Vic Chesnutt and the aforementioned Hurley. Do yourself a favour and have a listen.