Hamlet
Outdoor Drama

janglepop / jangle / jangle pop / lofi / bedroom pop / indie pop

I suppose I could be considered something of a Hamlet fanboy. My enthusiastic reviews of a couple of his albums led me to put my money where my mouth is and release his Camp Underground and Very Victorian albums on a double CD via our Subjangle label, along with his recent foray into a more full-band college rock sound with the quite brilliant (I know… gush gush) Light Under Repair EP, which resonated with both fans and critics alike.

As the label for Cincinnati’s Chris Wales’s solo recording project, it was quite a surprise when my ‘Bandcamp follow’ emails unexpectedly dropped a new album, Outdoor Drama, into my inbox like a sneaky thief in the night. I quickly grabbed my cell phone and hopped onto Instagram (you know me, I’m “down with the kids”… I even use the ‘whatisup’ app instead of texting these days!) to ask him a firm “So what now?”

His response was, “I saw Outdoor Drama as a basement compilation thing and just kind of threw it out there while working towards a proper thing next year.” After an hour, I not only persuaded him that this release could be his best yet, but also negotiated a CD release deal with Subjangle for November 2025.

As always, Wales’s vocal delivery drives his musical aesthetic through various levels of melancholy. Perfectly imperfect to a pristine fault, the emotionality he creates flows steadily through tracks like “Out The Front Door,” “Arches and Ashes,” and “What Do You Know,” juxtaposing slight hints of guitar-pop immediacy with subtle fuzz-pop inclinations that evoke the Guided By Voices essence while generally leaning towards the prettier sound of his No Museums label mate.

In “Thirty-Three and Two-Thirds,” the simply amazing “Town” and “Their Own Time”,” the sound plummets off the precipice of melancholy into the depths of absolute despair, as the jangled mix of Elliott Smith-style lo-fi introspection melds beautifully with the haunting essence of The Reds, Pinks, and Purples jangly beauty.

Of course, Hamlet always includes those ‘outside moments’ that seem intended to stretch his musical boundaries. “Outdoor Basement” maintains such a playful dissent with the alt-country-inflected machinations of the title track, as well as the glockenspiel-infused indie pop of “Red Trucks” and the surf-infused psyche-pop of “A Blamer’s Game.”

Throwaway basement tracks have never felt quite so vital!