Hiram-Maxim photo by Bryon Miller
We’re pleased to bring you the premiere of Hiram-Maxim’s new music video for their song “The Pain of Price” (watch it below). The track is taken from the band’s forthcoming album Ghosts, which is scheduled to be released on April 21st through Aqualamb. You can purchase the album here.
Hiram-Maxim drummer John Panza comments: “The video for ‘Pain of Price’ shows how loss leads to the slow emotional bleeding out of the ones left behind since in many cases of loss there is no panacea or relief.”
The video was produced, shot, and edited by Lauren Hilary Voss.
Upcoming Shows:
April 14 – Cleveland, OH at Now That’s Class (Ghosts Record Release Show) w/ Dèche and Ex-Astronaut
April 24 – Cleveland, OH at The Beachland w/ A Place to Bury Strangers and Relaxer
About the album:
It’s getting dark out there. People are seething. And when it all comes crashing down, this is the sound you’ll hear. Ghosts, the second release from Cleveland’s Hiram-Maxim, is a whorl of punishing noise and pounding beats, dark textures, bleak visions and howls of pain.
The authors of this beautiful nightmare—Fred Gunn, Lisa Miralia, John Panza and Dave Taha—are veterans of the Cleveland scene. They came together through the Lottery League, a citywide festival of ad-hoc collaboration. Taking in doom, noise, psych and shoegaze, the band’s sound is a testament to that anarchic spirit and the members’ disparate backgrounds.
Gunn, the front man, did time in punk bands. Miralia is an established figure on the noise scene (her largely homemade rig, featured in Gear Gods, is the envy of pedal geeks everywhere). Taha, whose previous band, Filmstrip, dealt in far-sunnier hooks, counts Elizabeth Cotten and Thurston Moore among his influences. Panza, meanwhile, plays with reckless abandon in several bands despite having only one lung. He lost the other to a bout with malignant pleural mesothelioma.
He was lucky to survive. Hiram-Maxim recorded Ghosts with Martin Bisi at his legendary BC Studio in Brooklyn, with some portions captured at John Delzoppo’s Cleveland studio, Negative Space. Clocking in at 42 minutes, the record’s seven tracks are as sprawling and expansive as those on the band’s self-titled debut. That 2014 EP drew praise from outlets like Vice and Decibel. But Ghosts is a step forward, its songs more focused and more vicious Gunn’s vocals are spoken and screamed, accusations and absolutions that take in personal suffering and state-sponsored acts of oppression. Miralia’s processed vocals and DIY electronics conjure up synthetic squalls and clouds of distortion, warped and abrasive textures that obscure the dark, bloozy groove laid down by Panza and Taha. And guest guitarist Oliver Ackermann of A Place to Bury Strangers, adds sonic broken glass to the opener, “Behind the Blindfold” and the title track, “Ghosts”.
On “Burn”, Panza’s thudding rhythms march in step with Taha’s fuzzed out stoner riffs until the whole is subsumed by a distorted swell of Miralia’s electronics and ambient noise. The title track, “Ghosts”, is a Sonic Youth-on-PCP basher with its propulsive churn and dissonant shredding. Here Gunn points to the underlying theme, observing, “there’s darkness all around us.” “The Pain of the Price” closes out the record with textured, slow-burn psych.
The band takes its name from the Anglo-American inventor Hiram Stevens Maxim. He’s best known for the Maxim gun, an ur-machine gun that helped turned Europe into an open-air slaughterhouse in World War I. It was an appropriate choice.
Ghosts is available in limited-edition 12-inch splatter vinyl, digital, and Aqualamb’s signature 100 page printed book format which features liner notes and lyrics, as well as photos by Gunn and others. Available online from: aqualamb.bandcamp.com.
