Neon Blonde is a side project for Blood Brothers band members Johnny Whitney and Mark Gajadhar. When I heard that the guys were supposedly going to show off their melodic side in band part deux, I was intrigued. What I discovered after giving Chandeliers in the Savannah a spin is that I must have no idea what the word melodic means or sounds like if this album is supposed to be an example of it.
While Whitney’s voice does do falsetto acrobats somehow managing to pitch itself over rudimentary sounding piano scales and Black Sabbath like guitar chords, I think the comparisons to David Bowie and Queen’s Freddie Mercury might have been a little generous. There is a bit of the darkly sensual Bowie type vocal that appears for a blip of second on the track “Dead Mellotron” when Whitney stops screaming for a moment but instead of the White Duke, vocally Neon Blonde is closer to Axel Rose sucking helium.
I don’t have anything against emoting while singing, but if you’re going to shout it, there needs to be some power behind the vocal which is lacking here. It’s not necessarily the vocalist per se, but the choice he makes to speed sing through every song like “Cherries in Slow Motion” which has the makings of an operatic “Bohemian Rhapsody” type song, but the fast pacing never allows any of the elements to gel.
Neon Blonde’s only attempt to truly slow things down is on the eccentric track “Chandeliers and Vines” which strangely enough sounds like a 1950s doo wop song with a punk vocal. It’s an interesting attempt at a different sound, but being the only one of its kind, it feels almost like an accident instead of an experiment.
Johnny Whitney and Mark Gajadhar have definitely managed to create music that is quite different than what you’ll hear on a Blood Brothers’ album. With time, as they did with their other band, Neon Blonde might find its own musical path but until then it might be best to give these guys time to harness their inner Bowie, Mercury or whoever else is supposedly lurking inside . . . . |