Album Review: I’ve Been Waiting For This

This album was originally recorded as home demos while Hamish Gavin was living in a community in Germany. Drums were later recorded at a home studio at a different volunteer project in Pisa, Italy while the mixing took place over the following year. This comes across as a DIY project, and the album cover reflects this, showing us some polaroids of him playing guitar, with the album title on a paint brush and his name carved into the table.

Hamish’s previous releases have been more electronic and rap related, while this release clearly contains other influences such as the Dunedin sound, bedroom pop and indie with far more guitars. This sounds as if it was recorded in a bedroom as opposed to a studio, with a lo-fi mentality, and vocals which have been influenced by the likes of Lou Reed and with only a passing knowledge of pitch. This makes it incredibly hard for the listener to understand what the artist is trying to achieve, and that is something I found with this particular release.

I’ve Been Waiting For This is an album which veers between the listenable and something which is quite hard to digest. This is not due to aggression or the stretching of musical boundaries in the normal sense, but countless hours of listening to music which has conditioned us to expect certain things and often this album does not deliver any of those. Hamish describes himself as “an artist developing” and that is very much the case, although whether he should have made those developments available for all to hear is another matter altogether. The frustrating thing is that when he ups the tempo and aggression, as on much of the track Look After Yourself, it is almost like a different album as often this works where the slower material does not. Having made it through this album a few times to be able to write about it, I can guarantee I won’t be playing it again as this just does not work for me, although it may be of interest to those who like their music incredibly raw.