Album Review

Half Cousin – Iodine

• 23rd Nov 2007

Some bands are like asparagus: you know you’d probably be better off for liking them but you just can’t bring yourself to put yourself through the experience. I feel if I liked Half Cousin I could think of myself as slightly more intellectual, a little edgier and probably a lot more pretentious, but dammit I just cannot like this music.

Like a weirder and more minimalist Cold War Kids in places, and more like Regina Spektor in others, this band have taken postmodernism all too far. Fair enough, ditch the traditional verse-chorus-verse structure, ditch the guitars and drums for a piano and some strings, but for God’s sake, hold it all together with some kind of central idea or something!. I know that syncopated rhythms, discordant sounds and odd instrumentation are all tropes used in the best alternative music, but its not often that they’re thrown together with such hysteria, and at the expense of any kind of personality for the band. Let’s not forget that the great Devendra Banhart has taken folk pop to new levels and still managed to make the music listenable.

Evidently I’m just too indoctrinated with preconceptions of what popular music should be, and maybe I could put myself outside of that mindset to really appreciate this band, but to be honest they don’t really make me want to. I probably could force myself to listen to Half Cousin more, but, like when I’m forced to eat my greens, in the end I’ll just head for the Dairy Milk.