Hopewell - Stranger

(Priapus, 1997)

Like many people, I imagine, I first got into Hopewell through the Mercury Rev connection – frontman Jason Russo and his brother Justin were in the Rev touring band through the late ’90s – but, while it’s easy to pigeonhole the dudes based on their family tree, it’s important to recognize FULLY that this here is no mere JV/little-sib music-making outfit. In fact, Hopewell, excellent from day one, has actually managed to improve over the years while Mercury Rev has descended further and further into squeaky-voiced, nature-obsessed, pentagram-wearing new-age nonsense. In the band’s earliest incarnation, it was dealing in loud and heavy – yet melodic – spacerock, like if the guitar-crazy Priest Driven Ambulance-era Flaming Lips took a more stoned and deliberate approach to their tape-saturation head-music. “Stranger,” a single taken from the band’s first album, gallops and clangs, the crisp drumming and tasteful keyboard calling to mind Saucerful of Secrets, albeit with much added aggression in the guitar-roar. The moaning, late-night acoustic cover of “Paranoid” flirts with novelty territory, but it’s a creepy enough stripped-down rethink and thus avoids such a knock. It’s puzzling that the band has seemingly written this initial phase out of its official history (their website, before disappearing, listed nothing prior to 2001’s The Curved Glass in the discography); there’s a lot of great music on these early, spaced-out records, and their continued scarcity is a shame.