Hanalei: One Big Night

Aug 182010

Best New Music
Hanalei: One Big Night
2010, Big Scary Monsters Recording Company/Brick Gun

In the early 2000s, Chicago was a haven for Jawbreaker-esque punk rock bands that rocked. Out of the scene came no less than the Alkaline Trio and the Lawrence Arms.

People forget the contributions of the other bands affiliated with the scene. One of the contributing acts was Brian Moss’ ‘The Ghost.’ That band, as I remember it, was better known for the band that it came from, San Francisco’s ‘The Wunder Years.’ I had seen The Wunder Years on several cheap-o compilations throughout that late 90s and always liked what they did. Brian never gained a huge following like Matt Skiba, the Alkaline Trio’s lead singer. He never really had the cult following that Brendan Kelly, the lead singer of the Lawrence Arms, did either.

Sometime in 2004, I began to hear Moss record as ‘Hanalei.’ As Hanalei, he generally arranged songs acoustically, with small rhythm tracks providing environment to the recordings. This setting really worked for him much better than The Wunder Years or The Ghost did. It made sense at the time, since nearly every lead singer of every regionally-popular emo band was starting his own version of Dashboard Confessional and Hanalei was definitely no different.

But Moss was a different kind of presence than the rest of the Dashboard Confessional emo sweethearts. The sweetness of his voice echoed his California beginnings particularly well, and everything that I heard from him was good in the sense that it wasn’t overdone. Moss took care by understating his aesthetic. He went full band on a second release, which bored me, and I didn’t think much about him again.

Somehow I stumbled upon Brian Moss’ Hanalei page on MySpace and read about this record, One Big Night. The record is another understated acoustic affair sounding dangerously close to hastily arranged demos more than fully developed songs. That being said, Moss has put forward a group of songs that is incredibly rewarding because they are so understated again.

The album’s crowning glory is the track, “Moth to the Flame,” a driving punk-inspired moment of hybridized screaming and driving rhythm, done acoustically. This is textbook Jawbreaker inspired pop-punk of the finest kind, done without the gloss of the current production of Alkaline Trio. It beckons Moss’ songwriting roots, but done in a way that is tasteful. Somehow Moss is able to explore this territory without being unnecessarily nostalgic, evoking the urgency of the aesthetic but not the sound of the day.

Moss’ subject matter is also restrained; rather than going for the textbook Rocky Votolato combination of heart-on-the-sleeve emotion, Moss retains many righteous/unrighteous thematic elements throughout the record. This is not foreign material to a Jawbreaker-inspired punk, yet Moss is able to create songs like “Scalpels and Saints” and “Neverending Cigarette” that aesthetically seem simple, and are thematically unrestrained.

It is this kind of attention that really legitimizes Hanalei on One Big Night. There isn’t the requisite boredom that most singer-songwriters explore in their mid-career malaise. There is real energy teaming throughout the release that evoke the sense of a songwriter with something to say and nothing to lose, but do so in such a way that don’t require glitz and glamor.

Cover Art and Mp3s via eMusic