One of the difficult things about evaluating music is imposing limits on artists/musicians I wouldn’t impose on myself. How is that fair? How can I literally write the most far-out reviews on the planet (seriously, if there’s a bigger weirdo-ripper reviewer out there, I’d like to know his/her name, shake her/his hand, give him/her a “goose”), inventing characters, using words that don’t exist, and likening a song to a sloppy bologna sandwich, and, often in the same fell swoop, tell an artist s/he needs to Focus in order to be all s/he can be?
It’s a tough job/contradiction/way not to make a living, but someone’s gotta do it. And so I have to throw it out there: Hannis Brown’s debut album is a wildly diverging bag of mixed paint, and it suffers from it. Absolutely exploding out of the gate with the titular, why-isn’t-it-a-household-track “Oh Ah Ee,” Brown, to my ears, squanders just about every modicum of momentum he gains from there on with arrangements that lack a center, singing I mostly wish wasn’t there, and a general sense of listlessness that only dissolves when it sounds as if Brown feels strongly about what he’s composing.
Tip-toeing along the lines of under-underground non-stars like Philip Karnats (actually I do believe he’s in Secret Machines now, a band that… sucks), Babe, Terror (yes, the comma is part of the band name), Au (another band that will either peel yr cap back or bore you to absolute DEATH), and Eric Alexandrakis (who lives in my current place of lodging; let’s have a beer, dude!), not to mention strong whiffs of Andrew Bird, Brown is another one of those musicians you come across and quickly become in awe of. He’s in command of so much here, fiddling, tootling, percussing (see! made-up word!), shaking, and baking, but he dilutes his message when he gets too obsessed with building grandiose compositions and center-piecing his voice.
His more effective punch-packages involve subtle picking, rapacious scraping, and soft sighing. “Never Know Where I’m Going,” for example, makes me want to toss the whole REIGN-IT-IN-ALREADY attitude from the start, as its all-corners venturing makes sense in its particular context. “Eyes Closed” also is a thriving metropolis that doesn’t get too clogged at rush-hour, delving into the gentle side of things and coming off like a soft-jazz radio number with a bit more PUNch.
But overall it’s a losing battle, the dozen-odd elements of many songs coming off as cluttered, the nuances lost amid a more-is-more aesthetic that picks up more Balls than Strikes by the time the Ninth rolls around. Again, though, this guy is SICK. Don’t think for a second he’s not going to figure this thing out (the reed-shredding of “Eh Uh Eh” is another highlight I should mention before we go into extra innings here) and SMACK a ball out of the park one of these days.
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