Hockman’s debut solo album is blanched in misery. And it’s good. The album unveils as a kind of demented songbook – three originals are carelessly (carefully?) sprinkled between 11 covers. Said covers range from All-American Folk hero Woody Guthrie, to Bob Marley, to Kerkorrel, James Phillips and The Handsome Family to The Lemonheads and, wait for it, Snoop Doggy Dogg. Readers intimate with the SA underground (no pun intended) will immediately recognize Gil Hockman as one of the founding members of discerningly celebrated outfit The Buckfever Underground. Hockman exited the group in 2009, to strum his way into, well, this. And it is a songbook, one made peculiarly his. From the defeated lament instilled into Snoop’s lyric “I got my mind on my money/ And my money on my mind”, to Seffrican geography slipped into Guthrie’s Americana classic, to Marley’s Concrete Jungle re-cast as epitome of post-Y2K losthood, Hockman makes these classics his own sad creatures. Elsewhere, as on Kristen Hersch’s Your Ghost, his droll, near-morose arrangements focus one’s attention on newly painful lyrics. What Hockman succeeds in is capturing the loss of centre, the ghost of self, of our current, cruddy, space in Time.
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