An elephant on stilts? This band must be good!
Gritty texture, loopy guitar, the new EP from Honeyhander is amateur techno. They hail from Providence, Rhode Island, fine soil for the cultivation of the avant-garde. Woolly Mannerisms is a push in the right direction but they need some more muscle in that push.
I can't help but think they are trying to modernize new wave eighties with late nineties industrial. This unlikely combination sounds processed and cluttered. They do, however, experiment well with textures. You can tell that there are more than three guys working the extra ticks and beeps. The five-man show elaborates on patterns the bass, guitar, and drums lay down.
A standout track, "Our Connoisseurs are Feeders" starts out in a typical piano tickled feedback crescendo then takes a little turn. The subwoofer deceives you into anticipation of electronica, laden heavy with drum machine and the latest four-key keyboard combination. Instead come the queued guitars and a surprisingly acoustic set of drums. The rift is catchy but undesirably so, because of its simplicity. I'm not sure whether the fuzzy distortion is serving to enhance the vocals or cover them up. Remember those plastic microphones you had when you were a kid. Is he singing into one of those? I think he is.
Shoddy production aside, Honeyhander embarks in the tradition of the Dismemberment Plan and Death from Above 1979. Armed with your average three pieces and machines that make a lot of noise, these fellows are bound to turn some heads sooner or later. I've always said five heads are better than one.
2/4
