Rich Bennett – On Holiday

If anything, you’ve gotta give Rich Bennett credit for embracing the somewhat-embarrassing (and super kitschy) aesthetic of smoky lounge-pop with open arms – in fact, his press kit namedrops the fairly unhip hotel-lobby standby Martin Denny before any other artist. That’s pretty ballsy, no matter how you slice it, especially when you’re going after the highly-selective indie rock press.

On Holiday is essentially an experiment in the emotionally-ached and the musically placid, several times throughout the album Bennett will be crooning in a theatrical, heartsick demeanor, but surrounded in a lethargic, intentionally-ignorable mashing of guitar wallows and twangy atmospherics. Take “Wild Ride,” where Rich adopts a darkened, Paul Banks-ish murmur (harmonized beautifully with Rebecca Pronsky’s transparent falsetto) – it’s the sort of thing whose natural habitat exists in the well-paved-over realm crunchy post-punk guitars and pulsing bass, but Bennett doesn’t think that way. He instead transplants the song into an unfamiliar world of mechanical acoustic guitar, earthy bongos and faded hand claps. That sense for risky songwriting elevates On Holiday as a whole.

The album definitely does have its slow bits, the middle of On Holiday is gratuitously occupied by the egregiously boring and entirely one-dimensional “EPO,” that earnestly sounds like some backwards attempt at writing lobby muzak for a gaudy Hawaiian dentist office. The house-band raga of “Night Pt. 1” doesn’t really achieve much more than a knowing smile, and generally speaking, the record gets by more on nostalgia rather than memorable songs. That being said, it’s still a helluva lot more interesting than your average, factory-pressed indie rock album. Rich Bennett is trying to do something incredibly ambitious, and maybe to a fault, taking the essentials of lounge, something almost universally joked about, and recording them in a new context and for a new audience. Does On Holiday succeed? Not always, but it’s at least fun to listen to him try.

Rich Bennett