2 out of 5

Label: Auris Apothecary

Produced by: Johnny Uekem (?)

When I was… 14? 15? I dunno, I had a guitar, and I had a girlfriend, and I used the former to write songs for the latter – acoustic, of course – and I recorded them to cassette, and gave them to her. Would you believe I sang and played one in front of a class, also? And perhaps, in my hair bleaching / coloring days, her initials were bleached into my hair. I was, in other words, the coolest, and aren’t we all, etc. etc., but please note I do tell you this story in the strictest confidence – you and me being friends – comfortable in the knowledge that you won’t find said girlfriend, and ask her about said cassette, which I’m sure she still has squirreled away for blackmail purposes.

Anyhow, she was a good sport and didn’t laugh at me (to my face); for my part, I knew this stuff was cheeseball, and suspected I couldn’t sing or play, but I had a kind of fake-it-’til-you-make-it belief, since so many punkers and rockers I liked didn’t necessarily have the best voices or could play the most complex stuff.

Which, given that this is all preamble for a review of Johnny Uekem’s Greyscale Hawaii, truly isn’t meant to imply that Johnny can’t sing or play, rather just to introduce this concept (long windedly…) that sometimes we listen to things, like, contextually. Girlfriend, and that class, would probably never have chosen at random to listen to my lil’ love songs, but aw boyfriend, and aw punk rock kid with guitar.

Greyscale Hawaii is a short, 9 song (plus intro and outro) recording of Johnny and their ukelele, flaws-and-all lo-fi recordings of poetic musings and lovey-dovey stuff. The bandcamp writeup mentions the artist as a friend of the label, and that’s what had me thinking through all that stuff up top: that if a friend gave me this tape, the context of that relationship might make it more enjoyable. On its own, Johnny’s warble is of the Bright Eyes school, but the lyrics here aren’t nearly as confessional or overwrought as Oberst’s, it’s just in that same vein of yearning, and hits on similar notes as early works by BE, though admittedly without the punk backing – this is all pretty straight la-dee-da melody. To which extent, there are some head bobbers here, but nothing that breaks a barrier of pleasantness, with most tracks too sketch-like to really achieve notability, but also not raw enough to hit the heartstrings without the aforementioned context.

I appreciate that this is not my scene, not really what I expect from Auris Apothecary – also kind of affecting my listen, for sure – and, once more, that maybe some awareness of Johnny would add to the experience. The liner notes artwork, sourced from old postcards, is super cool, which does match my expectations of AA.