Album Of The Week: Mallory Hawk Chinook

Who needs a style when you’ve got the songs? We’re living in a musical landscape mediated by algorithmic overlords, in which listeners often seek to be soothed by (possibly evil) ambient tones, burrow deeper into (often frictionless) aesthetics they already like, and passively consume (AI-generated?) tracks suited for various lifestyle functions. People of taste have been decrying the public’s preference for familiar slop over challenging, adventurous, hard-to-categorize art from time immemorial, but in the music world, the streaming era has intensified the primacy of vibes over tunes. Mallory Hawk’s Chinook flies in the face of that conventional wisdom.I use the language of aviation pointedly, and not just because the Philadelphia singer-songwriter chose to shorten her surname Hawkins to evoke a bird of prey. Chinook is named for the helicopters that dotted the sky during Hawk’s childhood in the military hub of Fayetteville, North Carolina. Her father reportedly called the double-propellered Chinook CH-47 “the only helicopter in the world that can collide with itself,” giving Hawk a metaphor for her own tendency to tirelessly care for those around her, to her own detriment. These ...