The principal musical styles underpinning Wish Road South come together on the album’s fifth track, “Black Metal Corpse Paint”. Up to – and after – this point echoes of, on one hand, the British folk-rock of Full House-and-later Fairport Convention and Heron, and nods to Loaded-era Velvet Underground are separate strands. Indeed, opening track “Flowers in the Garden” evokes the "Babbacombe" Lee Fairports at their most reverberant and stately, while the ensuing three cuts intimate a familial relationship with British VU-leaning indie bands like The Loft and Ultimate Painting.
Add in the mid-period Teenage Fanclub-esque “Heavy Metal T-Shirt”, the headlong powerpop of “Drinking With Judy” and album closer “A Gentle Place”’s hints of Lindisfarne lynchpin Alan Hull’s baroque melancholy, and it’s plain the fifth album credited to Hollow Hand is hard to pin down.
Hollow Hand is the musical vehicle of the Brighton-based Max Kinghorn-Mills. On Wish Road South – named after a Hove bus stop – his chief fellow travellers are Leo Clarke (bass) and Oliver Newton (drums: he was on the last Hollow Hand album, 2023’s Your Own Adventure; Clarke was not). Kinghorn-Mills has also played with Bess Atwell, Spencer Cullum, Aoife Nessa Frances, Caitlin Rose and former Midlake member Tim Smith’s Harp. Just over 20 years ago, he was in metal outfit Purge. Before Hollow Hand, as Wildeflower, he fashioned a form of psychedelic folk. All of which makes Kinghorn-Mills himself hard to pin down.
Appropriately then, Wish Road South comes across as if its creator wants it to be a heterogeneous experience. On its own, each song on the album makes its case and allures – Kinghorn-Mills has a winning way with droll, observational lyrics, and his sometimes sardonic delivery of them charms. But together, taken as a whole, these 10 tracks do not coalesce stylistically to form a cohesive entity.
