Honeycut
The Day I Turned To Glass
Quannum Records

A hint of what this record could have been happens well into the fifth track, “Dysfunctional”. The track starts off promisingly enough with a saxophone loop that would make Rashaan Roland Kirk proud that lays into a slinky groove speckled with keyboard and horn stabs. The vocalist for the group, Bart Davenport, does his best version of a soul singer, but drags the whole song down with flat intonations and trite lyrics. But, at about the minute and a half point, a female voice comes to the fore and with one vocal line, makes the whole song burst to life. Alas, she doesn’t stick around for long and we are stuck with Davenport as our tour guide, taking us through a museum of well-worn beats and vocal melodies.

The most frustrating aspect of a record like this is simply that Honeycut and so many other groups that have come before them don’t try hard enough. It seems that whenever a group of Europeans and/or American white dudes try their hand at soul or R&B, unless they have the chops to push the envelope, their music comes off like a carbon copy of their influences. Just look at the careers of Liquid Soul, The Brand New Heavies, and Jamiroquai.

RV Salters and Tony Sevener, the two men behind the music on this album, work overtime to reinvent a musical wheel with their backing tracks and, occasionally, come up with moments of levity and near genius (the scratchy sound that permeates “Silky”, the thrumming space station funk of the title track). Most of the other tracks sound like a How-To book for hip-hop/downtempo production.

As “Dysfunctional” demonstrates, this album could have been saved by a more adept singer. Davenport does his damndest to be the model of a soul/R&B burner like Otis Redding or Al Green, but his leaden attempts at melody, again, sound like a cover of “Try A Little Tenderness” photocopied over and over to the point of complete abstraction. This probably plays really well for the kids and suburban drones who haven’t been introduced to the genuine articles, but for the rest of the world, it makes one want to seek out their well-worn copies of Let’s Get It On.

MP3
Shadows

Websites
http://www.honeycutmusic.com
http://www.quannum.com