Inbokeh might be a guitar focused alternative rock band, but they aren’t riff merchants. The first distinguishing thing that long time fans of the genre will notice is their melodic gifts. Even when Danial Swafford’s guitar work blazes with enough ferocity to make you fear for your speakers, everything is laid out in a coherent fashion that has a clear beginning, middle, and end. Moreover, the guitar parts are restless creatures – meaning that Swafford sees fit to pepper them with all manner of idiosyncratic touches just to keep listeners guessing and, naturally, interested. The six songs on their debut EP Into the Sun are littered with flashes of outright brilliance and, when the results achieve more moderately successful ends, a sense that those more humdrum passages are mere notes away from having a much more compelling effect.
Inbokeh makes a concerted effort throughout the release to illustrate the different facets of their musical personality. It’s an audacious move to open the EP with the relatively sedate, perhaps even turgid, crawl of “Cool Days”. There’s an almost emo-like mournfulness surrounding the song and the melodies are elongated, seemingly shy to arrive at any sort of resolution. Vocalist Jonathan Burgess handles bass duties as well, but his vocals are one of the EP’s core strengths. He gets an enormous moment to shine on the song “Too Good to Be My Devil”, a surprisingly outright rock number from the band that eschews the theatrical aspects often characterizing the other songs. There’s a certain amount of wry, dark humor coming through here too completely missing from “Cool Days” that helps give the song a much more distinctive voice. It’s a voice that carries over to the song “Spend Time”, a sort of elliptical, streetwise poetry that matches the music well and finds a superb conveyor in Burgess’ deceptively wide emotive range. This isn’t music about virtuosity. Inbokeh are clearly a small collection of very talented musicians, but they are equally a band clearly concerned with capturing moments rather than crafting intricate musical composition illustrating their genius.
“Head Out into the Sun” is a song that might provoke a less secure band into heavy-handed attempts at profundity, but Inbokeh keeps their rock and roll feet firmly tethered to earth with this affecting and almost anthemic statement about choices and personal freedom. The narrators and speakers in these songs seem to be, somehow, dealing with mysterious personal reckonings – with their pasts, time, their mistakes, their mortality. This song does a fantastic job of giving that feeling the grandeur it deserves. The EP’s last song “Ghosts in My Hallway” has similar goals but arrives at them via different means. The past once again comes into focus here, but the song’s unusual twist is how Burgess doesn’t clamor to relive in anything, but rather live with what he’s done in a way that moves him forward. It’s an ultimately hopeful note to end the album on and emotionally satisfying.
Into the Sun is just that – emotionally satisfying. It also appeals to the intellect because it’s smart and never attempts to be anything else other than what it is – a straight forward rock album about adult themes and concerns. It doesn’t entimentalize anything, it doesn’t whitewash. More bands would do themselves well to write and play with such wide-open honesty.
9 out of 10 stars
Inbokeh – Into the Sun
Primary URL: http://www.inbokehband.com/
INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/inbokehband/
Cyrus Rhodes
