About Midnight.Haulkerton
It may not be to your taste, but a surprising number of people, who would not normally embrace the sort of music Midnight.Haulkerton plays, find depth and authentic meaning in the songs that Joel Falconer and his collaborators pen.
Admired for a voice that can send thrills and chills through your soul, Joel’s voice delivers lyrics that say more than your average tune. This sets Midnight.Haulkerton aside as a band that like others such as Cream, Guns N’ Roses and Nirvana have made a trademark sound. Grok Rock is what we call that trademark Midnight.Haulkerton sound, a unique blend of rough and smooth, with dark edgy undertones, addressing tough subjects with a sense of reality and devil-may-care, but-we-don’t-give-a-fuck-if-he-does-or-not attitude that is rooted in an appreciation of influences ranging as wide as Layne Staley, Marilyn Manson, and Daniel Johns.
Aside from the dark and edgy sound, there’s a sophisticated production blend to Midnight.Haulkerton’s songcraft. You can hear this in the way the Falconer’s voice wrenches meaning from a word, sometimes just a syllable, that articulates the weight of the statement and adds a layer of meaning that you just don’t find in the delivery of most vocalists leading a band.
“Rock,” says the Falconer, “has lost much of its meaning thanks to the commercial, bottom-line philosophies the music industry has taken on board since the 1970s when, full of their own hubris and the potential of the music industry to make megabucks, they got involved with heavy investments. That practically ruined the industry in terms of what it’s been putting out over the last 3 decades. So they don’t grok rock. We’re bringing the grok back to rock, but Grok Rock is more than just this. It’s about thinking.”
“Everything that Midnight.Haulkerton does is centred around this concept of ‘an idea whose time has come’, the concept at the very heart of grok rock. It’s what turns popular music into art: something real and important to communicate.”
“It’s art that forms, and expresses, culture, puts it into a context that enables us each to understand what’s happening in our society and our world. When all the crud that tries to pass for art is forming culture you end up in a situation and a state of civilization like the one we’re in. Who would wonder why society’s so fucked up when you can turn on the radio, and instead of hearing a song about the principles of profit, you hear so-called ‘gangsters’ giving their advice on shooting your mother and fucking the police?”
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