In Plain Sight

Album: In Plain Sight (Honeyblood) - By Tetsuo

Honeyblood's 2014 lo-fi debut remains the band's standout work. This third LP arrives five years later.

What was threatening to be something of a recurring theme with the departure of Cat Myers from the Glaswegian garage-rock duo (Myers being the third of the band's former drummers), Honeyblood is now officially a solo project for gifted songwriter Stina Tweeddale.

Following 2016’s Babes Never Die and irresistible post-album single "Swell Love", In Plain Sight experiments in new territory, dialling down their signature guitar fuzz and rackety energy, and dialling up a more varied production style alongside catty, swaggering swipes at ex-lovers. For the most part, the result is a disheartening – and at times embarrassing – musical detour.

"She’s A Nightmare" opens as undoubtedly the LPs most catchy jangle but, like each of the other ten tracks here, is conspicuously lacking in low-end or a trademark gut-punch chorus. Buzzy, stumbling lead single "The Third Degree" follows with egregious off-tune vocals, and the equally confounding use of a vocoder. From this shaky beginning, things unfortunately don’t get an awful lot better.

"A Kiss From The Devil" vies with "You’re A Trick" for the album’s (and band’s all-time) worst track, and it’s probably no coincidence that both are electronic, Goldfrapp-esque car crashes. Elsewhere, "The Tarantella" and "Touch" similarly lack focus or a middle eight hook, whilst "Gibberish" dabbles in dub-step beats, and embellishes the ranting, meandering lyrical fixations of In Plain Sight: of scorned exes, mystic revenge, and sexual temptation.

"Take The Wheel", "Twisting The Aces" and "Glimmer" flirt with past strengths, with slower, groovy guitar riffs, yet all might have failed to qualify as filler tracks on earlier works. Although clearly a personal endeavour, without a band dynamic Tweeddale’s compositions and lyrics now appear clumsy and hollow, with too-often questionable production filling in the gaps.

In Plain Sight has plenty of surface bite, but the towering, heart-stopping riffs and intrigue surrounding their self-titled debut – or even the excitable exuberance found on sophmore effort Babes Never Die – is sadly nowhere to be found here. Tweeddale’s next move will determine whether this was simply a misstep of numerical necessity, or that Honeyblood’s lo-fi intimacy and anthemic promise remains on the FatCat Records releases.

Three out of Ten