Old Friends Doing Good (retitled and reposted from The New Confusion)

Copied this over from my post at TNC from last week:

Okay, so this feature is a sharp turn for The New Confusion, but they knew what they were getting themselves into when they made me a contributor. Although I realize that hip-hop will probably always be our main focus musically here at TNC, I think it's important that we focus on innovative music from all genres, especially artists and bands who find genre boundaries themselves completely permeable. This leads me to the Bay Area act known as Honeycomb.

Honeycomb are a quirky, but incredibly polished musical hybrid, an ensemble that pulls as much from hip-hop, jazz and classical traditions as they do from indie folk and pop. Front woman Emily Ritz lays the foundation of the band's sound with her ukelele, singing in one of the more unique styles around. Her vocal technique blends the old-school melodic sense of jazz and soul singers like Billie Holliday or Erykah Badu with more contemporary indie aesthetics, beautifully clear yet raspy and haunting.

The trio of Karin Dahl, Courtney Wachtel and Heather Normandale provide lustrous, often unconventional harmonies with multi-instrumentalist Kacey Johansing rounding out the vocal section with power and grace. Nathan Blaz and Joe Louis play cello and standup bass respectively, providing a depth of sound that give the band much of its sonic texture and Andrew Maguire, with his impressive vibraphone chops, adds ambient tones and melodies that complete the aural tapestry of this eight-piece.

The fact that Honeycomb has the same amount of members as the current lineup of The Wu-Tang Clan may seem a strange parallel to draw, but is actually significant considering the fact that Emily Ritz claims Ol' Dirty Bastard as her greatest musical influence. It's an influence you can actually hear on a track like "China Basin," which features a plodding ukelele-driven verse form that drops straight into a hip-hop breakdown in which Ritz's vocals are as much ODB (or perhaps even Left Eye from TLC) as they are CocoRosie. Most of all though, Emily praises Dirty's fearless drive to be himself artistically, and that is clearly what Honeycomb has done in their pursuit to make the music they want to make, regardless of anyone's preconceptions about genre and pre-established form. Songs like "Sparrow," played in the live video above, straddle the line between experimental folk and some sort of orchestral sonata, melding deep staccato strings with soulful, choral vocals that proclaim the coming of spring through imagery of birds taking flight. The culmination of much sonic experimentation, this ensemble has finally developed an innovative and cohesive sound that mirrors the finely patterned, yet dripping and dense quality of the honeycomb that Emily has been drawing in her visual art (or on any available surface) for years. With a strong buzz already in the Bay, Honeycomb is poised to make a mark in 2010.

The group released their debut EP at the Noise Pop Festival in San Francisco on February 26th, a collection that will be available on iTunes any day now. Check them out on MySpace for upcoming info on that, and if you like the video above, you can check out their whole entire set from their One Night Music session here.