Liz Hogg, Liz Hogg

by Raquel Pinheiro

Liz Hogg is American guitar player and composer Liz Hogg's first album. It was recorded between 2009 and 2018. Its ten songs are, at first, simple and straightforward. As one listens to them over and over again, a multitude of layers appears. Small filaments that drive and connect the ideas started by Liz, most of them as kernels, later turned into a fully constructed, complex song.

The album songs were recorded in succession with Liz using every instrument and piece of equipment she owns to manufacture them, ranging from ten guitars (electrical and acoustic), six different types of keyboards, an assortment of pedals and amps, a cello, maracas and even a sitar.

All those instruments and equipment are merged into an external shell, rendering it almost impossibles to realize each song took so many different things to come to be. There are odd sounds, trepidation, moments of relative or complete peace, haunting vocals and a general sense of strangeness.

Liz Hogg, the album, displays a set of songs ranging from beauty with dashes of frantic, Ridge, to more quiet and conventional All Concealment Is Treachery. Monastery is a mostly instrumental piece of experimentalism with vocal background murmurs used as one more instrument.

This Is Trash has cool breaks, Sexy Fisherman starts and ends as catchy and happy and turns more linear and somber in the middle, I.L.M., has diverse ambiences, tones and changes probably making it the most strange song of the album, while Forgive Me is another mostly standard song.

Liz Hogg is an interesting album full of contrasts, changing moods, often in the same song. It is filled with a compelling spectrum of sounds and vocals that make it a fascinating intricacy of possibilities.

(Mouca, 2018)