HATFIELD AND THE NORTH

Nothing embodies the Canterbury Scene quite like Hatfield and the North's self titled release, with its eccentric yet vaguely refined sensibility on songwriting and overarching song structure. The lyrics tend to poke fun at the establishment of music and culture alike, but also tend to relate to spacey introversion, like examining a dream in detail. The meandering and warm improvisations seem to follow a definite path, but Hatfield and the North excel in the art of occasional and necessary atonalism (via taking a harmonic note and running off in a tangent and eventually coming back to the original path) mixed with a lose sense of time signature. Basically Hatfield and the North take jazz concepts and instrumentation then fuse it with the aesthetics and subject matter of British Psychedelia.

The album differs from other Canterbury releases in that it showcases conventions and attributes from the entirety of the scene; in other words it's eclectic, but mostly in the context of Canterbury. From a more general perspective "Hatfield and the North" is successful in that it's a complex interweaving of strong and soft dynamics, complex melodies, improvisations, mood changes, and most importantly contains a wide array of textures. There is always something new to discover with each and every listen, some new textures that comes to the forefront of the complex mix (depending on how and where you listen to the album), or some new way to interpret the enigmatic lyrical "content" throughout the album. Hatfield and the North are able to build such a complex textural compendium in bending the traditional tasks of their instruments or through the use of musique concrete (or found sounds).

Hatfield and the North is one of those albums that are essential to any musical collection, because of their ability to experiment while still being bound to some sort of code or tradition.