The Beauty Shop "Crisis Helpline" (Snapper)
By Kimberly Rosenbauer
Thursday. Mar 22, 10:01 AM
Their scissors are dull.

Hailing from Champaign, IL, The Beauty Shop are a three-piece alt-country group who have been compared and esteemed to the likenesses of Johnny Cash, Beck, and Violent Femmes. I tried to hear the connection. I tried to feel it. I could not.

Beating to the bush, the band’s sound is not cohesive enough. They have separately good elements, but altogether they just aren’t impressive. For starters, singer/songwriter John Hoeffleur’s deep baritone voice has an inner beauty to it but his talk-sing style isn't able to propel the lyrics with any kind of energy or motion that another band’s singer might offer. He also has a very small vocal range as well, which makes for limited and very similar melodies. I can’t help but be reminded of the singer from Crash Test Dummies when I hear Hoeffleur sing.

The guitar lines are "country-simple" and, in most songs, present a down-home, raw kind of feeling. Nothing distinctly wrong with this. It’s just that when your music is so pared down and simple, your lyrics and/or vocals then need to carry most of the weight, and here they don’t. Lyrics like: “Passed out underneath the disco ball / that you got from Spencer’s at the shopping mall / kids these days love rock and roll” from the opening track just don’t cut it.

All of the tracks seem like an extension of the other… but in a redundant, boring kind of way, though many of them try desperately and unexpectedly to break into a “rock” feel every once in awhile. The track that stood out the most to me in a positive way was “Nightcrawlers” because of the steam engine-sounding beat the subtle cymbals made, next to a soft and steady guitar chord progression. The lyrics compliment the music well and the song stuck to its calming mood rather than try to attack two musical styles at once.

Overall, I was not impressed as I found this album to be ho-hum. A little bit of something – lyrics, vocal delivery, melodies, whatever – can go a long way. Nothing went very far on this album.
www.thebeautyshopband.com
www.snappermusic.com

Listen to a song from this album in our Radio section!

Click here to buy this album on iTunes!

Click here to download the iTunes jukebox application for Macintosh or Windows!

Kimberly Rosenbauer

Got something constructive to say? By all means, rant away. Gonna blab about something unrelated and/or talk shit? Don't expect your comment to stick around.