HONEYHANDER
Woolly Mannerisms Strictly Amateur Films ________________________________________________________
Strictly Amateur Films is a new upstart record label so impossibly hip
that I feel like the oldest guy in the room whenever I’m on their website.
I mean, they have AIDS Wolf on their roster! It would never dawn on me to
sign a band called AIDS Wolf. So anyway, Honeyhander is on SAF, so you
know they’re inscrutable, genre-less, and probably smart-asses. What you
may not know is that they’re from Providence, Rhode Island, which is 45
minutes away from Boston, but so much weirder you’d think it was a
different country. Everything in Rhode Island is wet, all the time, and
you can find a parking space anywhere, even downtown at noon. Where is
everybody? They’re gone, daddy. The whole city is haunted, and I think the
mayor is in prison. So it is from this strange soil that Honeyhander have sprung, and they bring with them a
strange new sound, a
creepy crawl for the 21st century, a throbbing black pulsebeat that brings
to mind 80’s dancegoth and like, Death From Above 1979, minus the
power-grudge guitars, with a little A.R.E. Weapons-style disco-punk attack
thrown in for the devil kids. There’s also plenty of proggy distractions,
including bubbling synths, babbling brooks, and chirping birds. It’s like
the inside of Saladfingers’ head, if you gave him Ecstasy and left him out
in the rain for a few days. Most assuredly, some factions of the rock
press will tell you this makes Honeyhander avant garde. I am here to tell
you they sound mostly like that fuckin’ scary old video arcade they used
to have downtown, the one where all the gangbangers lurked, playing Double
Dragon or whatever, while Asian industrial-pop blasted out of the stereo.
It’s cacophony, but cacophony with guns, which is always more interesting. To be
honest, I had every intention of hating this – it’s got song titles like
“Wear Out Your Muscles Mary” and “Hiding Small Children In Cabinets”,
after all – but I dunno, it grew on me, like a bad idea that keeps getting
better the longer you drink about it.
Strictly Amateur Films is a new upstart record label so impossibly hip
that I feel like the oldest guy in the room whenever I’m on their website.
I mean, they have AIDS Wolf on their roster! It would never dawn on me to
sign a band called AIDS Wolf. So anyway, Honeyhander is on SAF, so you
know they’re inscrutable, genre-less, and probably smart-asses. What you
may not know is that they’re from Providence, Rhode Island, which is 45
minutes away from Boston, but so much weirder you’d think it was a
different country. Everything in Rhode Island is wet, all the time, and
you can find a parking space anywhere, even downtown at noon. Where is
everybody? They’re gone, daddy. The whole city is haunted, and I think the
mayor is in prison. So it is from this strange soil that Honeyhander have sprung, and they bring with them a
strange new sound, a
creepy crawl for the 21st century, a throbbing black pulsebeat that brings
to mind 80’s dancegoth and like, Death From Above 1979, minus the
power-grudge guitars, with a little A.R.E. Weapons-style disco-punk attack
thrown in for the devil kids. There’s also plenty of proggy distractions,
including bubbling synths, babbling brooks, and chirping birds. It’s like
the inside of