Put aside the wearisome shorthand of “psych-folk” and “Americana”, because neither gets near the thing. This is music that smells of damp timber and old amplifier valves. The guitars hang like cigarette smoke in a closed-up bar, the vocals arrive half-whispered from the next room, and the rhythms shuffle along with the loose, unhurried gait of a man who has nowhere to be and all night to get there. Across ten tracks, Easy drifts from woozy cosmic country to garage-rock crunch, then down into darker, heavier trenches where the drone thickens and the floor seems to tilt.<\/p>
The album’s conceit is love, but not the laminated greetings-card sort. This is love as fever, as hallucination, as something that bleeds into mortality until bliss, death and devotion are indistinguishable. Think of the pagan hum of early Spiritualized, the cracked tenderness of Mazzy Star’s best hours, and the narcotic patience of Spacemen 3, all filtered through the Appalachian hollows rather than the Rickenbacker-and-reverb tower blocks of the English Midlands. Easy has a gift for repetition, the kind that doesn’t bore but hypnotises, so that a single riff, turned over and over like a stone in the pocket, starts to feel like scripture.<\/p>
The two singles frame the record’s twin poles neatly. “Hot Honey” is the come-on: warm, golden, languid, a slow pour over the senses. “Venom” is the reckoning, heavier and meaner, its sweetness curdling into something with teeth. Hear them side by side and the title makes perfect sense. Honey and venom are, after all, the same substance viewed from different sides of the hive.<\/p> What makes the record remarkable is its self-possession. Recorded entirely by Easy himself, it has the intimacy of a confession and none of the self-indulgence that so often curdles the bedroom auteur’s lonely labours. Nothing is overcooked. Space is treated as an instrument in itself, and the silences between the notes carry as much weight as the notes. Carl Saff’s mastering gives the whole thing a lovely, lived-in warmth without ironing out a single wrinkle, which is precisely the right instinct. A record about desire and decay should sound slightly worn, and this one does, like a favourite shirt or a well-thumbed paperback.<\/span><\/p> Kara Lee’s artwork completes the picture, all the more fitting for a record that feels half-remembered even as you hear it for the first time. That, in the end, is Easy’s great trick. These songs seem to arrive pre-loaded with nostalgia, as though you had dreamed them years ago and forgotten, and are now being gently reminded by a stranger with a guitar and a very good ear.<\/span><\/p> This is music for the long, strange hours, for headphones at two in the morning, for the drive home with the windows down and the world gone soft at the edges. It rewards patience, then rewards it again.<\/span><\/p> Three albums in a year might suggest haste. *Honey Venom* proves the opposite: a songwriter hitting a deep and unhurried stride, in full command of his mood, his materials and his mythology. Lick it slowly. Mind the sting.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
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