3 out of 5

Label: Asthmatic Kitty

Produced by: Brandon Buckner (recorded by)

OMG you hate this.  OMG nevermind you love it.  OMG wait, you’re totally ambivalent toward it.  …And that, dear friends, is the magic and curse of short-song maestro John Ringhofer, as Half-Handed Cloud, able to string together albums and albums worth of endless pop ditties, with just enough riffy flourish between each minute-long sing-song to classify as a new track.  And just when the falsetto voice, clever spiritual lyrics, and toy piano instrumentation begin to grate (assuming you’re of a type where they don’t grate right away), he tosses in some ridiculously compressed mini-masterpiece of complex instrumentation and enviable enthusiasm.  Yes, he’s like the twee, religious Bob Pollard.

The m.o. on Halos & Lassos hasn’t changed much, except to be a comparitively stripped down act on many tracks – relying much on an omnichord for the album’s backbone sound – but ‘stripped down’ for Ringhofer is relative: he crams 19 songs into 29 minutes, so it’s not like there’s room to breathe, maybe there’s just fewer dinky-doo instruments cluttering up that room.

The lack of change also means: a lack of progress.  You either buy this shtick or you don’t, and I find – as my lead-in statements were meant to suggest – that my willingness to buy depends on the time of day.  When the sun is out, HHC and I get along just fine.  If I’m itching for angst, after four or five songs the charm only carries me so far.

The definition of YMMV, in CD form.