There’s a particular mood that Paris produces at a specific hour of the night, cafés empty, the metro stopped, the city finally quiet enough to hear itself think, and Hangman’s Chair have been making music for that hour since 2007. Saddiction is their seventh album and their most refined expression of it: doom that moves at the pace of regret, dark rock that sounds like cigarette smoke in winter.
“To Know The Night” opens the record with the band’s characteristic patience, a guitar figure that circles, bass that anchors, the whole thing building toward a vocal melody that arrives with the casualness of something inevitable. “Kowloon Lights” reaches for the album’s most atmospheric moment: the band’s interest in Middle Eastern and North African musical elements surfaces in the modal guitar work, giving the track a character distinctly different from the doom tradition it occupies without departing from the album’s emotional logic. “2 AM Thoughts” does exactly what the title promises, quiet, circular, the kind of track you’d put on alone after a certain hour not because it helps but because it’s accurate.
“Canvas” closes the record with the band’s longest and most developed track, and the choice to end on something open-ended feels right: Saddiction is an album that doesn’t resolve, which is its greatest achievement. Life doesn’t resolve either.
The production is atmospheric and close, guitars with a dry, slightly reverberant quality that keeps the post-rock elements from washing out the doom foundation. Vocals are treated to sit within the mix rather than above it, which gives Benoît Roux’s voice a quality of confession rather than performance. The rhythm section is spare and unhurried; nothing is rushed, which at some tempos requires more discipline than playing fast.
Standout tracks: Kowloon Lights, 2 AM Thoughts, Canvas
Hangman’s Chair occupy a corner of heavy music that very few bands can claim: genuinely sad without being melodramatic, heavy without being about heaviness. Saddiction is the best record of that description they’ve made.
