Is it any surprise that the virginity of 2010 is still in its infancy and we already have a Hawksley Workman release? Not really. Here comes Meat to deflower the year, especially with its visually avant-garde album cover: a silhouette of a somewhat distorted, naked woman’s torso, plump breasts in the top-left corner ready for breast feeding, as the head of singer/songwriter Workman (real name Ryan Corrigan) consum(mat)es her womb.
Meat is Workman’s eleventh full-length album since 1999—not to mention its counterpart Milk, which is soon to be released digitally, and countless EPs. This small-town Ontario cabaret glam rocker doesn’t live music; he breeds (through) it.
Anti-urban themes have always underlied Hawksley’s music, but with Meat he takes it one step further; the album art is merely suggestive of what to expect: songs about constructivism, solidity, determination, wholeness. If his previous albums were a defence for and a celebration of natural man and an attack on urban man, then Meat is a repositioning, almost as if Hawksley has experienced defeat and he has to (re)create himself.
Sonically, Meat is Hawksley’s most nuanced work yet. The album is heavier than the mellower Treeful of Starling and Between the Beautifuls, and while it incorporates some of the rock elements of Los Manlicious and his earlier albums, “Song for Sarah Jane” for instance—the album’s best—is John Lennon with a piano gone gritty, while “French Girl in LA” and “(The Happiest Day I Know is a) Tokyo Bicycle” employ poppier elements, such as a catchy woodwind melody in the former.
Some of the more experimental rock moments are, however, annoying, including the unnecessarily long outro in “You Don’t Just Want to Break Me (You Want to Tear Me Apart)” and the very odd screams in “(We Ain’t No) Vampire Bats.” The end result is that Meat has scant traces of bone.
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