THE HALO BENDERS
Don't Tell Me Now (K)
Self-awareness can be a wonderful thing. The Halo Benders demonstrated this fact on their first album, God Don't Make No Junk, which amazingly transformed musical and lyrical clichés into a bunch of witty, addictive tunes. However, on their second album, Don't Tell Me Now, this once endearing (and, arguably, brilliant) self-awareness has matured to an uglier state-they have become aware of their self-awareness. Thus, their second album feels a little canned.
The Halo Benders have a helluva lot going for them. They have a cool name. They have the amazingly sinister deadpan bass of Calvin Johnson (formerly of Beat Happening). They have Doug Martsch's slightly whiny tenor, a perfect counterpoint to Johnson's growl; it adds a melodic pop sensibility that could be the voice of Johnson's unconscious. They have instrumentation that is spare enough to highlight the dry hilarity of their lyrics, but still manages to at once conjure up melancholic thoughts of go-go bands and lounge acts from the '60s.
So, you might ask, what are the Halo Benders missing? Well, on their first album, very little. But this new album lacks the movement of the first one. I realize that this sounds like a very abstract criticism, so let me put this into language someone outside my head could understand. Say you go to Willoughby's every day for iced coffee, and one day, you decide to get an iced cappuccino. And, once you taste it, you realize it's much, much better than its cheaper counterpart. So you start getting them every day. But you start to realize that the Willoughby's line is getting longer and longer as each day passes because now everyone is ordering iced cappuccinos. And then, a couple of months later, they just don't taste as good. Because since everyone's ordering them now, they've started making them faster and weaker. They still taste okay, they haven't removed any of the crucial ingredients, but they're just not as strong as they used to be. Maybe you keep ordering them, but you long for the days when they tasted of coffee and milk and not melted ice, before everybody else discovered them.
My hypothesis is that the success of God Don't Make no Junk made the Halo Benders a little too conscious of what they were supposed to sound like. So in order to please (a noble objective), they made a weaker version of their first album so everybody wouldn't have to wait in line for so long. But like a watery iced cappuccino, the caffeine rush is lost with Don't Tell Me Now.
This new effort does have a few good songs. But since they're sandwiched by songs like "Halo Bender" (could a band be any more self-indulgent? A song that's named after them?), they just make you long for the old album.
You must be wanting to bat me over the head already-"stop longing, get over it, bring in the new!" you might be thinking. No, thanks. I'd prefer to remember the days when the Halo Benders didn't make no junk.
-Rebecca DiLiberto
Copyright 1996, The Yale Herald, Inc. All rights reserved.
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