Howie Beck

If you weren't part of the small but ardent cult that developed a few years ago around Howie Beck's brilliant second album, Hollow, then now's your chance to get acquainted. Hollow, a modest, home-recorded labour of love quietly released in his native Canada, quickly found an audience of enthusiastic and supportive critics, musicians and indie-rock aficionados in his hometown and managed to amass a small army of devotees on at least a couple of continents over the next two years.
Publications such as Mojo, Time Out and The Face raved, while the magazines Uncut and Record Collector went so far as to include it on their year-end best-of lists, respectively dubbing the album "a brilliantly evocative portrait of emotional loss and mental comedown" and "a classic debut." The Toronto Star said:? "Incredible. Hunt this down. Please."

Howie's live dates overseas were greeted warmly, tunes from Hollow began turning up in A-list T.V. shows like Buffy, The Vampire Slayer, Felicity and Queer As Folk, and invitations for opening gigs with artists as diverse as Ed Harcourt, the Stereophonics, Interpol, Aimee Mann, Josh Rouse, Shelby Lynne and the Wallflowers poured in.

Then began what Beck himself euphemistically describes as "a weird time." While on tour in the U.K. in 2001, Howie found his travel plans abruptly disrupted by the Sept. 11 terror attacks. Days later, one of his UK label's two directors tragically took his own life and Hollow suddenly and necessarily took a distant back seat.

Appearances on albums by such chums as Sarah Harmer and Hayden let Howie's faithful know he was still making music, nevertheless it took five apartments intermittently rendered unlivable by string sections, drumkits and entire refridgerator-loads of groceries sacrificed to the recording process (Beck has a tendency to ignore his own "FRIDGE IS OFF" signs) and a comparable number of irate landlords to birth the 13 immaculately arranged songs that make up his first full album of new material in five years, the laconically titled howie beck.

The results, as the saying goes, speak for themselves. Howie beck introduces a new spaciousness and a remarkably surefooted, classic-pop polish to the music, but not at the expense of the whispered, 4 a.m. intimacy and naked honesty that led so many to hold Hollow so close to their hearts. Guest appearances by chums like Feist ("I Need Light"), Matthew Caws of Nada Surf ("Sometimes)? and Ed Harcourt ("Don't Be Afraid") and artistically adventurous forays into bossanova, waltz-time folk and gleaming New Wave pop likewise haven't compromised the disc's pronounced sense of self nor its authentic urgency

Earlier this year, howie beck was released to rave reviews overseas, and Beck toured in support of the record through UK and Europe with Nada Surf and Josh Rouse.

On this album, one still unmistakably hears the articulate, unaffected voice of Howie Beck. It's just a more confident, nuanced and disciplined instrument, and one well placed to finally carry Beck's work to the wider audience it sorely deserves.? (One could suggest that evidence of its triumph can be found in the fact that it inspired Jason Collett, of Broken Social Scene, to invite Howie produce his latest solo album.)

One would, in fact, be tempted to call howie beck its author's masterpiece were it not so clear from the evidence at hand that there's so much more left to come.