Milk for Flowers
H.Hawkline (Huw Evans) has today announced details of the release of his fifth album, Milk For Flowers. Released on Friday 10th March 2023 via Heavenly Recordings, the album was produced and features musical contributions from long-time collaborator and celebrated solo artist Cate Le Bon. The album will be available as black vinyl, signed CD and digital pre-order. It follows the 2017 album 'I Romanticize' and 2015's 'In The Pink of Condition.' Recorded at Rockfield Studios in Monmouthshire, the album features a host of musical collaborators - Davey Newington [Boy Azooga] on drums, Paul Jones [Group Listening] on piano, Tim Presley [White Fence, DRINKS, The Fall] on guitar, Stephen Black [Sweet Baboo] and Euan Hinshelwood [Younghusband, Cate Le Bon] on sax, Harry Bohay [Aldous Harding] on pedal steel and John Parish [PJ Harvey, Aldous Harding] on infrequent bongo. The record was then engineered by Joe Jones [Aldous Harding, Parquet Courts] and mixed, after an unlikely and fortuitous crossing of paths, by the Grammy-nominated Patrik Berger [Charli XCX, Robyn, Lana Del Rey], and mastered by Heba Kadry [Deerhunter, Cass McCombs, Cate Le Bon]. ⦿ On Milk For Flowers, beauty flourishes in the corners of grief’s desecrated church; jewelling the cobwebs, gilding the dust, and making a relic of its creator’s arrow-shot heart. Brought to being in Huw Evans’ hometown of Cardiff, the writing of the album served as the outlet for several dances with the violence of life — a spate of significant events which took his “spectrum of emotion and experience suddenly widescreen”. Where 2017’s I Romanticize and 2015’s In the Pink of Condition might be thought of as dadaist art objects — feeling and meaning obfuscated by the absurd — Milk For Flowers belongs firmly in the realm of the divine; not only for the auspices, saints, and holy bakers that populate its lyrics, but also for its exquisite torment; the gateway to a newfound profundity of voice. “I’m not so good at showing vulnerability and I think that’s why, in the past, there’s been a tendency to obscure or make abstract any real emotion, either lyrically or musically” Evans reflects. “I think this was most apparent with the way I sang, keeping everything as flat and emotionless as possible. It was impossible to do any of those things with this album: I had to sing.” Milk for Flowers is at once visceral and enlightened, its soundscapes verdant yet delicately rendered, and with this latest, most intimate work, H. Hawkline beautifully bares his blood, bones and soul. And quietly, along with the entrails and rubble held in Milk For Flowers’ reliquary, there hides a small, green kernel of life; hope, perhaps, that today’s decay might nourish tomorrow’s blooms.
The Welsh songwriter’s fifth album flits between whimsical psych-pop levity and candid expressions of grief. At its best, it brings the two together.
The very start of Milk for Flowers makes it clear that things have changed for Welsh singer/songwriter Huw Evans, aka H. Hawkline.
Huw Evans’ immaculate work as H. Hawkline has been overlooked for far too long. Having created mesmeric, lysergic pop music for more than a decade, his talent for simple psychedelia, absurdly memorable and memorably absurd lo-fi folk should not be so treated.
Produced by Cate Le Bon, the Welsh singer-songwriter’s fifth album, written in the wake of his mother’s death, is a slow-burning triumph
Milk For Flowers by H. Hawkline review: a more vulnerable offering from the Welsh songwriter and Cate Le Bon collaborator
Milk For Flowers by H. Hawkline album review by Greg Walker. The singer/songwriter's full-length is now out via PIAS/Heavenly Recordings