Album Review: Hangman's Chair - A Loner
Reviewed by Dan Barnes
Purveyors of Gallic Gothic-Doom, Hangman’s Chair, return with A Loner, album number six and their first since 2018’s Banlieue Triste. Gone now is the Stoner-Doom sound that dominated their early albums, replaced by a darker, more mature, direction that embraces the melancholy.
As a whole A Loner takes the sorrowful and runs with it, building haunting and hypnotic monuments to sadness through the use of gentle strings and delicate vocals. Central to the album is the kind of fragility normally delivered by Katanonia; that combination of melodic and morose, finely-honed by the Swedes, is on full display on the likes of Who Wants to Die Old? and the slow and spacious Storm Resounds, in which the images of raging seas are evoked as each cymbal hit becomes a wave crashing against the base of a promontory on a dark and rainy night.
Hangman’s Chair aren’t afraid to mix things up here, either and, although their predominant sound of one of morose, that doesn’t mean there can’t be moments of hopefulness sprinkled in. Cold & Distant fizzes with heartbreak but does so with a deceptively upbeat and catchy riff; and the title track might have depressive periods, but it features passages that you might find yourself humming later.
Pariah and the Plague is a hypnotic instrumental that makes full use of echo and reverb to enrapture the listener with a feeling of the epic and the timeless, a sensation foreshadowed in the preceding Supreme.
Bookending A Loner are opening track An Ode to Breakdown and the climactic A Thousand Miles Away; both of which add elements of post-metal to the fray, to underscore the heavy, repetitive nature of Hangman’s Chair’s sound and to counter the delicacy of the other, more subtle parts of the record.
Mixing the heavy and the subtle in such a way makes A Loner a record that rewards repeated plays and establishes an atmosphere that, depending on your frame of mind as you enter, will lift you up are pull you down. Such is the power of the music here.
So, if you’re a fan of a darker, more introspective, music and have the likes of Katatonia, Type O Negative and Woods of Ypres in your collection, then give A Loner a spin – you’ll be glad (or sad) you did!
