<span><span>- Do you know hjpierce? I...uh, do not really. Not willing to take all the blame myself, he does like to keep things on the down-low. The Tassie ex-pat now also likes to call Brisbane home and it’s where he’s snuck out his fifth (!) full-length album (you can hear some, not all of them, on his bandcamp). I think it must be quite difficult to put out five records without turning more heads. Perhaps it’s because hj is a multi-disciplinary artist? Amongst the sculpting and other stuff, the music is just a little bit of what he does. I know what <em>you’re </em>thinking, but let me stop you there, it’s actually quite good, you cynics.</span></span>
<span><span>I’m not certain when one person and a loop pedal became a ‘time-honoured’ method of musicing, but in the long wake of <strong>Reggie Watts</strong> there’s a lot of producer / multi-instrumentalists taking their place in that tradition. That’s the same tradition that hj has been mining for a few years now. Other than that hj doesn’t have much in common with Reggie. To listen to his earlier stuff he has been a fan of post-rock, lashing his musical canvases with big, emotive swathes of crescendoing and guitar. He also knows how to be a bit more interesting than many of the very four-to-the-floor folks in the post-rock field, bringing a jazzy, introspective complexity to his rhythms.</span></span>
<span><span>On his latest you’ll hear some developments beyond that. Synthetic beats and harmonies bring a ping to the trebles that his home-studio work had previously lacked. These additions also fundamentally change the focus of what he’s doing here. This mid-tempo synth-rock has both proggily hypnotic quality and leashed energy you’ll find in the beats of artists like <strong>Tycho </strong>and <strong>Bonobo</strong>. </span></span>
<span><span>It sets up a number of challenges for hjpierce, not just because Tycho and Bonobo are past masters of these sounds, but because you can hear a new generation of beat-driven prog-rockers like <strong>D.D Dumbo</strong> and even <strong>Machine Age </strong>who are absolutely killing it (and they sing as well!). It might sound like I’m saying these challenges are getting the better of the guy, but not really, there’s a bunch to like about <em>PEOPLE </em>and hjpierce is on an exciting trajectory. He’s quite a prolific creator too, so I’m figuring the next album’ll be here shortly. My wishlist for it would be ever-so-slightly higher-fidelity production and some more dance beats to break things up (it’s what the kids want, anyway, give it to ‘em). It’s odd to describe someone who’s been working away across the course of five full records as ‘one to watch’, but hjpierce has been hiding his light under a bushel and I intend to keep my eye fixed on him from today on.</span></span>
<span><span>- Chris Cobcroft.</span></span>
<iframe style="border: 0; width: 100%; height: 120px;" src="https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=3773771204/size=large/bgcol=f…; seamless><a href="http://hjpierce.bandcamp.com/album/people">PEOPLE by hjpierce</a></iframe>
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