Honey Power are an up to the minute set of indie rocking new wave revivalists not from Brooklyn but from the equally hip enclave of Tartu, Estonia. On the surface,
Macrosilly is just another album's worth of songs by a fresh-faced young quartet reworking the sound of the decade they were born in, à la all the bands that came after the
Strokes, the
Killers, and
Interpol. But a closer listen reveals that although
Honey Power are undeniably fashioning their songs out of the catalogs of bands past, they're not doing it in exactly the same way as most of the similarly inclined U.S. and U.K. bands. Rather than pick a select handful of influences from one particular alternative rock subgenre,
Honey Power feel free to put
New Order basslines against
U2 guitars and
Erasure synthesizers, topped by a singer and lyricist, Martin Kikas, who combines aspects of both
David Byrne and
Robert Pollard.
Macrosilly is the sound of a young band from a place where there isn't enough of a local scene to enforce the Balkanization of indie rock that means the sunny synth pop kids can't play with the gloomy shoegazer kids, or that the
Cure is still cool while
Smashing Pumpkins very much are not. As a result,
Macrosilly romps giddily through the last three decades of indie rock culture and comes up with songs redolent of
Pavement at their most sardonic and lo-fi ("Learning to Walk"),
Belle & Sebastian-style twee indie pop ("Jacques de Secretkeeper") and the
Strokes' exquisitely tailored boredom ("Plug Me In"). And that sense of stylistic freedom, so lacking in so many of their blinders-wearing new wave revivalist peers, eventually becomes its own sort of new creativity, making
Macrosilly a lightweight but definitely non-guilty pleasure. ~ Stewart Mason