2 out of 5

Label: Plastiq Musiq

Produced by: John Ringhofer

Though certainly not unpleasant, the Half-Handed Cloud tracks on the Jiminy Circuits EP are so slight that they’re hard to even register. While your average John Ringhofer – generally the sole HHC writer / recorder / player-of-all-instruments / etc. – tune is short, a handful will generally net a good percentage with a catchy melody and a cute turn of phrase; something you’ll continue to hum for a while afterwards, and also unique enough to stand out on its own.

Jiminy Circuits is perhaps just too brief to give its eight tunes (three of which are less than a minute; none more than two) enough time to find space in your brain, flowing in and out of short-term memory, but these also seem especially short on the catchiness and honest quirk that makes John’s work stand out amongst other twee, folksy oddballs.

There are moments! The chorus of ‘We’re Giving It A Chance’ hits on some pleasantness, and feels interestingly more confessional than John’s regular prose, and the little bursts of sound throughout the EP are surely interesting, but even here the songs seem just less dense than usual, almost like demos – captures of pre-songs.

Tellingly, though, when this stuff was represented on the wide-spanning Gathered Out of Thin Air collection, they worked better, gathered amidst material that props them up. On their lonesome, though, the songs on the Jiminy Circuits EP are pretty thin.