Ham1's CD Release Party

By Gage Henry

The Caledonia Lounge resembles a dimly lit basement with more crowds, less couches and what appears to be a makeshift stage where even the bravest audience members hesitantly inched towards at the beginning of the show– the perfect atmosphere for a band like Ham1 to perform to its pure, lackadaisical potential.

Like most bands dwelling in the murmur of the Athens music scene, Ham1 is just another one of the city’s best kept secrets, but maybe they like it this way. This Saturday night show was the CD release party for their third album, The Underground Stream, yet their set was squished between the bands Don Chambers & Goat and JEFF the Brotherhood.

Ham1 wasn’t the headliner. They were the meat of the sandwich.

The four band members wandered on the stage around midnight with a presence that was casual at best, and somehow the group was able to squeeze in 13 songs and a technical difficulty delay for a psychedelically sweet set that lasted under 45 minutes.

“Oh, that sounds awful,” said the keyboardist after the band cracked out a tight sound check that resembled a song playing in the background of a lazy Napoleon Dynamite scene. He jabbed a couple more keys while cringing. “Technical difficulties… Do you know a joke?” he asked the lead singer, Jim Willingham.

Willingham then turned around and candidly chatted with the drummer, who apparently did know a joke but didn’t think to tell it into the microphone. The next three or four minutes played out more like a shtick rather than an awkward silence, where the bassist and keyboardist fumbled with chords at the foot of the stage, and the drummer and leader singer exchanged bar jokes in the background.

The abandoned crowd was too busy eavesdropping on the scene before them to acknowledge their abandonment at all. It was funny, quaint and a perfect introduction for the upcoming bombardment of meandering tunes and comical lyrics.

Ironically, the next words sung out by Willingham were: “Will you ever see me again?”

Ham1’s abstract appearance perfectly mirrors their music, yet unlike the striped feather protruding from the tuning pegs of Willingham’s guitar, the droll melodies and nasally vocals were still elements you can wrap your head around and think, “Yeah, that works.”

The group’s quirkiness increased with their volume and tempo. After the third song a man dressed in a faded checker suit walked out on stage with a trombone that soon struggled to play hoarse notes as if the instrument had been strained by laryngitis, a fitting accoutrement for a band that dedicates an instrumental ballad to a deceased pet chicken named Franklin (written with only two words shouted at the songs close: “Go Franklin!”)

If anything lands in the group’s suggestion box, it is simply the length of their songs, which averaged around two minutes a pop. Most were composed without a chorus and linger long enough only to tempt like a peck on the cheek. Their rhythms lured people to shuffle their feet and then completely dropped off the table, stranding a handful of dancers in the sway of their own silenced grooves.

The trace stumbles of Ham1’s melodic inflection eventually gave in to classic entropy, a noisy jungle complete with a raspy trombone, where clashing cymbals, thumping drums and reverberating guitar chords were topped off with Willingham sending the tinny sound effects of a plastic toy gun into the microphone by the end of the last song, a resourceful and primitively satisfying way to close the show.

The band is indubitably odd, but in no way do they stretch themselves to fit this mold. I’d never heard of Ham1 before that night, and they genuinely unfurled as if they were so wonderfully themselves, never reaching beyond their own capabilities or hinting they had anything to prove.

The lyrics of Ham1’s sleepy-toned song, “Low Expectations,” communicates the band’s motto:

“Low expectations / it makes everything OK.”