Single review: Paul Hawkins & Thee Awkward Silences – I Believe In Karma

I can’t quite be sure what to make of Paul Hawkins & Thee Awkward Silences. Judging by “I Believe In Karma”, their second full-band single, it’s pretty plain to hear that someone is having a laugh; what I’m less certain of is whether or not it’s at my expense.

So I’m going to assume that we’re laughing with each other and not at each other. In which case Paul Hawkins & Thee Awkward Silences must be assumed to straddle some sort of tripartite line between music, poetry and character-based stand-up comedy. This is not your average indie band.

The opening bars of “I Believe In Karma” might make you think you’ve been yanked bodily backwards through a decade and a half, as its shimmering psych-rock guitar buzzes and scratches away like some half-heard “… and another thing” from the last days of grunge. Just as Thee Awkward Silences seem to be settling into a solid but unremarkable garage blatter, Paul Hawkins‘ vocals kick in.

And this is where you start to be less sure of yourself, because Hawkins goes on to subvert the seeming seriousness of the music by doing a convincing impersonation of a Samaritans phone call from a bitter and lonely I.T. sysadmin who’s just gone postal and rewired the corporate servers to spam the entire planet with a carefully formatted bullet-point list of his woes, compiled in date order from the exact moment of his fifth birthday.

The title of “I Believe In Karma” is repeated in the chorus (followed by “… where’s my reward?”), and seems to be a damning indictment of trustafarian pseudo-spirituality married to middle-class privilege, a satirised thumb-sucking “where’s my personal jetpack” rant … either that or I’ve misread it completely, and Hawkins had just had a really shitty day before he started writing it.

That same ambiguity of purpose carries into the second track. “My Darling Frankenstein” is a sprawling spoof of a rock opera, a street-level Andrew Lloyd Webber chop-shop job fuelled by cheap booze and dirty pills where, once again, Thee Awkward Silences are the backdrops to Hawkins’s surreal soliloquy.

The characterised mysogyny of the song’s voice is oddly apposite in a world where we have instant access to megabytes of pornography and can create, much like Dr Frankenstein himself, a composite of human parts that contains no actual humanity … or something like that, anyway. Hawkins’s geek-psycho persona is the perfect delivery vector for the material; we just have to hope no one makes the mistake of conflating the artist and his art and assumes that Hawkins is speaking from the heart.

So perhaps you see my difficulty with “I Believe In Karma” – I can’t be sure whether deconstructing it is the right approach at all, or whether I should be just treating it as the audio equivalent of Viz. If the former is correct, then I must applaud Paul Hawkins & Thee Awkward Silences for an admirably bizarre commentary on post-modern society.

If the latter is correct, of course, the joke is entirely on me. But taking these tunes apart made them fun to listen to, so I can live with that.