Week 2: Heypenny

I want to start out by acknowledging a review of the band I’m about to cover that’s a million (or a jillion, I guess), times better than the one I’m about to write.  The review comes from SYFFALL, and it summarizes the Nashville based indie-poppers Heypenny as follows:

Everything from 70's rock to 80's electro to a topless Lionel Richie to the aforementioned Nick Jr.-style giddiness, these jagbags are the pricks of Nashville squirting left-field electro jam on a boogie-based butter topped muffin, baked within a muffin pan made especially for muffins that shall be topped with boogie-butter and left-field electro jam.

Woah.

I won’t come even close that in therms of vividness, but I’ll do my best.  Heypenny, who are self-describedly part of Nashville’s “flourishing indie-rock scene,” have forged a style so eclectic that there’s really no end to the ways they could be described.  Depending on who you ask, they’re Frank Zappa meets the Monkees, or Yes meets Ok Go, a more poppy version of the Pink Spiders, or even the aforementioned boogie-based butter muffin topped with electro jam.  To me, they sound like Cake if Cake were produced by MGMT, or maybe Spoon with a few members of Radiohead.  Adjectives such as bouncy, infectious, groovy, jangly, and bubbly seem to be ones that rise to the surface again and again across multiple listeners.  Regardless of what they do sound like, it’s certain that Heypenny does not sound cliche or tired; this is something wholly separate from the overgrown jungle of folk/country/singer-songwriter/acoustic guitar and/or telecaster sounds that have already claimed nearly every crevice of Nashville.

Unlike last week’s band, I haven’t had the chance to see these guys yet, although I likely will be seeing them next weekend at East Nashville Underground (and so should you!), so I’ll focus on their most recent release, “A Jillion Kicks.”  The first album to bear the group’s name was “Use These Spoons,” but this included material written mostly by lead singer Ben Elkins while he was living in Chattanooga.  Highlights from the album include “Parade,” in which Elkins really nails the sardonic speak-sing Cake-style vocals, “Star for All the Kidz,” which features an almost parasitically catchy falsetto hook, and the unexpectedly thoughtful “Emperor’s New Clothes.”  Really, there isn’t a single bad song on the album; every single song features some sort of fascinatingly hypnotic element that makes you want to swallow the whole thing hook, line, and sinker.  The only times you don’t buy in are during certain segments of songs such as “Water” and “Angles and Arches” that descend into chaotic stews of blips and beeps (at least, when these can be heard beneath relentless cymbal banging).  Ben Elkins’s jam band roots are definitely evident on songs such as these, but instead of drawing me in these sonic forays just bored me.  This sort of self-indulgent noisemaking seems to be somewhat of a trend in a generation of Radiohead disciples who all want to sound “experimental or “p rog,” but I really wish it would go away.

Aside from these brief moments of weakness, however, Heypenny’s indie-pop electro-jelly boogie muffin of an album delivers a much needed injection of mojo into the Nashville indie-rock scene (which, I would argue in disagreement with them, is anything but “flourishing”).  They’ll no doubt receive some flak for borrowing and/or stealing little bits of countless other artists and acts and absorbing them into their amalgam (the marching band uniform obsession is practically a violation of OK-Go’s copyright), but I don’t have a problem with this.  Good artists create, great artists steal, right?  U2 was practically a tribute to “The Clash” in their early years, but branched out and eventually invented a sound that has been imitated probably as many times as Will Ferrell’s “Ron Burgundy” character.  I’m excited to see what these guys have to offer next week, and beyond that, in the coming years.

And just in time for the Holidays:

Rating: 7/10