Hasco Enjoyments: Wow!

There won’t be too many records in 2025 that provide such a contrast between image and sound than Hasco Enjoyments’ Wow! Sonically, it’s a world away from its the cover art, which is somewhere between a billboard for a children’s program and characters featuring on a cereal box.

The brainchild of John Peter Hasson, having made music under the JP Inc. moniker (2021’s Massage & Spa), Hasco Enjoyments is an extension from previous encounters. On Wow!, Hasson weaves between enclaves within the sound world of experimentalism, and he’s aided by a slew of guests from his native Los Angeles to achieve it.

The first of many humourous song titles throughout Wow!, It’s OK To Put Ketchup On A Hot Dog, If That’s What You Like To Eat is swaying post-rock baked into filmic ’80s soundtrack music fit for candle light dinners. With soft soprano saxophone from Trey Magnifique and Hasson’s swooning guitars, it makes for a gentle wave of calm. The mood, offing-setting the title in yet another paradox that envelops this album.

Meanwhile, David Pajo provides keyboards on Sprouse Reitz and later on The Seattle Mariners Are My Favourite Baseball Team – panoramic snapshots where soft colours of sound and echoes of Morricone-tinged underground pop form for something that completely soothes the ears.

Shifting away from this more uplifting and accessible aesthetic, Finance, Fashion, Healthcare & Sports and Executive Bonus stir in the milieus Labradford and Boren and De Club of Gore once inhabited. With the subtle metallic ringing of Hasson’s baritone guitar, these moments permeate with a stark AM vibe, adding new dimensions to this evolving concern.

It continues on Armed Only with the Jagged Shard of an Ortega Brand Taco Shell. Again with inflections of Morricone, there’s a layer of ominous dread that ambient country stalwarts such as SUSS have mastered over the past several years. On what is perhaps the best song title of all, Sometimes My Dad Is An Eagle, it’s about as majestic as the bird of prey itself. A meandering form of mediation music, here Hasco Enjoyments pulls apart soft rock and finds psychedelia in the fissures.

It’s been a tough month for Los Angeles, to the point where it feels strange writing about an artist that inhabits the city writing the kind of songs he does. The title itself, going against the grain of the collective mood, coincidently feeding into juxtapositions that form the Hasco Enjoyments experience. It’s the subtly to empower which is Wow!’s greatest strength, and in a time where a city needs some light, Hasco Enjoyments is there to provide it.

Wow! is out now via Rope Worm. Purchase from Bandcamp.