This time of year the shadows stretch long across the frozen landscape, adding a lightly brushed undercurrent of foreboding to everything. Â It’s always there, lurking, feeding the darker human emotions, even when the event of the moment is a totally enjoyable holiday celebration. Â When you put that feeling to music, you get what Honeylark calls folk noir, which is the exactly right description for their debut album, Heavy.
Honeylark + Fiawna Forte – “Afternoon” (Official Music Video) from Nathan Poppe on Vimeo.
The first cut on side 1 of the album (that’s right, it’s vinyl or download only, no CD) is Widow, a musing about the black widow spider on the window sill, with a gothic chorus that makes the song kind of creepy beautiful.  Riverbed is a brassy, bouncy, light-hearted song about…death.  Hospital carries more of an indie sound in the early going, but builds a Wagnerian crescendo that’s practically oppressive.  Yours & Mine features the Ryan Houck half of Honeylark’s husband and wife songwriting team on banjitar, and similarly builds to a crescendo at the end, though not perhaps so Teutonic as Hospital.
 A number of tunes on the album take the much lighter approach I mentioned earlier, with the noir a much subtler bit of the background.  Afternoon is a bitchy fun song about being either a morning person or a night person, I’m not sure which.  Love Is Red is mostly bluegrass, but singer Natalie Houck puts a bit of steaminess to it.  The final cut of the album is Big Red Alarm Bell, with a Celtic lilt that laments, “I wish I was stupid enough to be happy.”  I’d like to hear The Pogues or Flogging Molly do a cover of it.
Heavy is my first album to review this year and it’s a great place to start. Â It’s full of texture and melody and emotion–the perfect answer for what to do if you’re stuck inside because the weather outside is frightful.
About the author: I've actually driven from Tehatchapee to Tonopah. And I've seen Dallas from a DC-9 at night.