Welcome
to the rest of your life, pal. Do not pass Go and
do not quit your day job.
Some people are fearless in
the face of the unknown. Some people long to test
themselves against the most sublime experiences
life will throw at them. Some people need to push
every boundary, voraciously explore every avenue,
and feel the risk of danger in order to feel alive.
Honey White's full-length debut album How Far Is
The Fall is not about those people. Instead it revolves
around the feeling of standing at life's cliffs
and taking a long, hard, appraising look at every
possible detail before making choices about anything.
Paralyzed indecision and self-conscious over-analysis
pervade almost every lyric of each song, and everything
is blown up to newly epic proportions by a hazy,
spacious void of sonic effects and instrumental
textures. It's not the soundtrack to the rest of
your life. It's the background noise for the time
right before you have any idea what the rest of
your life will bring.
It was appropriate, then, that
the creative process that spawned this album didn't
start out full of purpose. Following their first
whirlwind year together, when the band had navigated
the Santa Barbara scene on the bare-bones strength
of their debut E.P. and semi-chaotic live shows,
Honey White put on the brakes in mid-2003. Frontman
Bryn DuBois took his blue-green acoustic guitar
to Europe for three months, guitarist Brian Wolff
finished school and packed off for San Francisco
(via a tour of Tokyo), and drummer Bill Fedderson
got his speed-punk fix playing and recording with
the Isla Vista thrashers of Futureman. While his
bandmates recharged their batteries and sought inspiration,
bassist Keir DuBois stayed and stewed in Isla Vista,
bashing his head against the wall of an anemic local
post-grad job market and an only slightly less indifferent
local music scene.
When Honey White finally did
reconvene in early 2004, they quickly leaned toward
music that forced a redefinition of each player's
sonic role within the group, exploring a new pool
of material that was challenging to create and exciting
to play. The rhythm section gelled as never before,
creating a solid base for the guitarists to soak
with sound and for the vocals to fly high overhead.
Bryn brought home three songs from his trip, "Let
Go", "Keep Moving", and "Bottlerocket",
that were quickly mutated by the rest of the band
(and the guitarists' arsenal of effects pedals)
into porously monolithic slabs of echo, tremolo,
and reverb. The new sonic colors infected other
recent loud, downtempo compositions like "Sweet
Oblivion", and "Famous Last Words",
as well as older tunes like "Mercy Rule"
and the instrumental "Polarity". Honey
White even got to show some nascent, obtuse craziness
in the form of Brian's "Sean Goes To Africa",
an instrumental along the lines of the bent humor
of The Mojo Wire.
The songs' lyrics oozed frustrated
impatience, false bravado, mild boredom, and an
absolute lack of solutions to the problems described
therein. "Mercy Rule", a live hit and
the oldest song of the ten, covered a bouncy, semi-syncopated
groove with a morose attrition of confusion: "too
smart to waste the effort/too stupid to appeal/to
anyone too superficially unreal". "Sweet
Oblivion" seized on a drifting, wavy rhythm
guitar, and the narrator passively floated out to
sea, smugly snarling "if only you could see
me now". The lyric to "Keep Moving"
similarly tried to egg itself on and "keep
busy, keep moving, go on" simply for the sake
of forward movement. "Let Go" imagined
a love affair at the precipice of dissolution and
wondered not about the fatal impact but instead
"how far is the fall?" Holding patterns
are accepted at face value: "Island Fever"
admits there's "no surprise on this horizon"
and "Famous Last Words" observes "familiar
wreckage in the aftermath of fucking up again".
Without the lush instrumental backing (or Bryn's
sensitive vocal delivery), the words- and songs-
would be hopelessly insufferable. Distractions are
offered up in the alcoholic cynicism of "Bottlerocket"
and bewildered hangover of "Blacking Out",
but the malaise perseveres, even infecting an instrumental
with its mood; "Polarity" ambles unsteadily
from quiet to loud to quiet again. The only respite-
the giant middle finger to the rest of the album-
is the other instrumental, "Sean Goes To Africa",
inspired by a character who actually did escape
out into the wider world and stay there.
Having mentally purged themselves,
(Keir later admitted that actually writing this
stuff got the worst of it out of his system) Honey
White let the songs solidify further at a few local
gigs. These went well enough to compel the band
to make another dent in the muddy lower corners
of rock history's rusty edifice with their own full-length
studio debut. When incubating the album at Nate
Perry's Take Root studio in San Francisco, Honey
White had the masterful and empathetic assistance
of engineer Jonathan Mayer. The recording sessions
were marked by day-long (and state-long) drives,
potent caffeine, late nights, baseball on the radio
during breaks, and meandering discussions on everything
from sci-fi to politics to video games to Zappa
to the Simpsons. Despite all that, the first session
alone was massively productive: Honey White warmed
up with several takes of Neil Young's "Dead
Man" theme, then ran through three takes each
of their own eight originals, and even spit out
a few formless jams. With Jon at the helm and accepting
an active role in arranging two more songs ("Island
Fever" and "Blacking Out" emerged
from more jamming), not to mention employing the
full arsenal of Take Root's noisemaking flotsam,
the album steadily came together over the course
of one or two weekends a month in the latter half
of 2004.
By the time Honey White resumed
gigging in earnest, they had now been comfortably
and sonically restructured on a model that had been
proposed by Bill for a year: Bryn's vocals took
precedence over his soloing, Brian and his effects
took over most of the lead guitar work, and Keir
stuck to background vocals and keeping in lockstep
with Bill's only slightly simplified drumming. The
new album's songs took their places with authority
in live sets, and Honey White ended up jettisoning
most of their covers and all of the Mojo Wire songs
to make room for the longer, more epic tunes from
How Far Is The Fall. The album itself was finally
released in April 2005, solidifying Honey White's
self-assurance as musicians, songwriters, and record-makers
among their friends, fans, and the band themselves.
If My Band Rocks was flexing new muscles and showing
off, How Far Is The Fall was throwing punches with
skilled precision. If My Band Rocks was about defining
range without fully accomplishing that, How Far
Is The Fall was about first exploiting that range
and then redefining it. Not bad for a group of songs
that started off so stuck in a rut, and not bad
for a band that started over from square one. Life's
indecisive background noise may indeed be a crushing
deadweight, but more often than not it can be a
push in the right direction or even a catalyst for
an explosion of inspiration.
back to top
