honeyhoney

honeyhoney is quite the twosome. Spearheaded by the pristine vocals of Suzanne Santo (who plays banjo and violin) and guitarist Ben Jaffe (who also plays some drums), honeyhoney is an ensemble piece, backed by several session musicians playing other assorted instruments on the recorded final product. For the most part, the pair emits soft, lilting and nearly precious indie pop music on First Rodeo.

There's an easily detectable neo-jazz influence on songs like "Little Toy Gun," "Sugarcane" and "Not for Long." While Santo isn't a husky, smoky siren like, say, Amy Winehouse, she's a classy broad who has plenty in common with Norah Jones. Santo manipulates her earthy, old soul voice in a contemporary and youthful way, which makes the album timeless and able to cross boundaries and ages with relative ease. The fact that the band uses a panoply of horned and stringed instruments, like mandolins, furthers the overall eclecticness of the sound.

honeyhoney and First Rodeo don't pay membership dues to any specific genre, instead preferring to skip across eras and fuse elements of '60s rock, soul and jazz into their own indie-infused brew. "Bouncing Ball" is breathtaking and romantic, while album closer "Oh Mama" crushes with its air of delicate sadness. "Come On Home" sprints to the finish line with a twangy, down on the range guitar tone. Because of all these factors, the album's musical personality is incredibly bipolar, pogoing across the mood spectrum, like, well, a bouncing ball. The one constant is Santo's uplifting and chirpy voice!

— Amy Sciarretto
12.23.08

Like Amy Winehouse fronting a jazz-influenced country band, Honeyhoney's debut is a diverse offering of twang, swagger, swing, and stomp. Vocalist Suzanne Santo sings with a neo-soul croon that owes as much to the saloon as the nightclub, cracking one minute and lapsing into an elegant vibrato the next. It's a voice that adapts itself well to other styles, from the boozy elegance of ballads like "Bouncing Ball" and "Sugarcane" to the throaty, Nashville-influenced strains of "Not for Long." Santo also handles violin and banjo duties, two instruments that help emphasize her band's homespun blues, while her partner Ben Jaffe tackles most everything else, playing piano and electric guitar while claiming the bulk of the songwriting credits. Several of First Rodeo's highlights previously appeared on the Loose Boots EP, which previewed the band's genre-bending experiments in early 2008. Of those songs, "Give Yourself to Me" and "Little Toy Gun" stand out as the duo's most energetic material; the latter song even finds room for firearm sound effects, mixing sensuality with the sort of sassy, '60s-styled camp that often peppers Quentin Tarantino movies. New offerings only sharpen the band's approach: "Come on Home" is a dirty duet before Santo's alto and Jaffe's Mississippi Delta riffage, "David" orchestrates a breakup note with tasteful strings and piano, and "Slow Brains" begins with old-timey banjo pluckings before making room for lush harmonies and keyboards. First Rodeo covers a good deal of ground, yet its appeal never suffers at the expense of its diversity, which makes for a truly promising debut. ~ Andrew Leahey, All Music Guide