It’s taken an age, but art rock quartet The Half Rabbits have finally released their debut album, a focussed, disciplined hymn to city life. As you’d expect from the subject, the record has bags of frazzled energy, and the playing is as tight and accomplished as you’d hope to hear, unsurprising as the band have been together for many years. However it suffers from certain defects that make the Half Rabbits a band to respect from a distance rather than one to embrace with love.
The best way into the album I think is to ignore the concept and listen first to the more accessible tracks such as ‘This Changes Everything’. This is a big-bottomed, riff heavy rock out, with Chris Rant’s lead guitar locked splendidly with Alice Watanabe’s bass. Michael Weatherburn’s mannered baritone is not everyone’s cup of tea, but he has a meaty tune to get his teeth into on this one, and Watanabe’s sweet harmony adds welcome colour.
Another strong tune is ‘Stay Positive’, with its nod to T-Rex in the intro and another purposeful Weatherburn vocal performance. Like many Half Rabbits songs, it’s quite danceable, thanks to Sally Pelling’s rock-the-disco drumming style. The lyrics are on the opaque side, occasionally sounding like a lift from ‘Chicken Soup for the Soul’ or some such chirpy self-help manual.
Things slip a bit on ‘In Vulnerability’, which might have worked better as a glacial Chris Rant post-rock vehicle; the vocal melody sounds laboured and tacked on. ‘How Right You Are’ is an under-produced and oversung acoustic piece which seems to stray incomprehensibly into the Spanish Civil War (presumably on the trendy side) before making a strategic retreat into by-now-familiar obscurity. ‘Antidote’ is the cry of a secular urban prophet, though the lack of hooks suggest there may not be many disciples.
Rather too late in the day, the album snaps back into focus on the ninth and tenth tracks. ‘Magnet Mountain’ is a splendidly raw yell of rage against the powers that treat individual human beings as statistics. ‘Man Down’ has some excellent, nerve-jangling drumming from Pelling and coolly minimalist lead work from Rant.
So ends a solid, clean but not terribly appealing album from a talented but rather uncharismatic group. Weatherburn’s sardonic vocal style will alienate many, and his melodies are often uninteresting (‘This Changes Everything’ is the exception that proves the rule) and there is a lack of instrumental colour which means middling songs like ‘These Rumours’ and ‘Someone’s Coming’ tend to become interchangeable. It may be another nail in the coffin of The Concept Album, but ‘From the Horizon to the Map’ has at least furnished three or four excellent tracks for my latest mix tape.