A Honey Wagon
New London, Connecticut, United States | INDIE
Music
Press
"How Come Every Time We Get Kentucky Fried Chicken It's Raining Outside?"
A Honey Wagon
Rodeo Clown Records
Band-propelled hype: "Influences: the Thai Elephant Orchestra. Sounds like: A piano being dragged through a parking garage."
Rock critic-created scenario utilizing A Honey Wagon's stylistic antecedents: Roky Erickson kidnaps the Swell Maps and together they shimmeringly produce a new CD, though, for some reason, the vocal tracks are recorded inside a culvert. And, yes, they insist on KFC for the listening party. It then starts raining, but that's OK because everyone is singing and wet and eating chicken.
Representative tracks to enjoy: "Storm Chaser," "January Thirty-Third," "Water Wings." - theday.com
A song that’s both easy to listen to and artistic seems like an impossible feat in today’s musical climate. Most people believe in order to make artistic music you have to be so abrasive that you alienate people from your sound. Most pop music is watered down formulaic garbage. Why is no one aiming for the bull’s-eye anymore? Is it the artist or the audience? Does any of this really matter? How come every time we get Kentucky Fried Chicken it’s raining outside? by Honey Wagon proves that it does matter. It’s equal parts Kinks and Exploding Hearts; it’s careless and fun without ever being sloppy and thoughtless.
Terry Flynn (vocals & guitar), Chris Moore (bass) and Jay Curland (drums) have raw musical energy that they’ve crafted into beautifully produced, listenable pop rock songs. Simple, energetic, four chord rock songs are usually turned into lo-fi recordings that intentionally sound bad in order to give them credibility. Honey Wagon took pride in this recording and labored to get a fully formed product and layered sounds to fill in all the spaces that a live show can have. The vocals are doubled and harmonies added with great care taken to add the correct effects rather than just slapping a huge amount of reverb on them. The guitar may be thin and jangley (ala the Jam) but again with multi-tracking and proper application of effects it loses its abrasiveness and fits into the mix.
With all that being said about Terry’s contributions to the record, it’s the rhythm section that makes this record complete. The bass lines are elastic and melodic and the drums play to the songs and really accent the performance. Instead of just being the backbone of the band Jay and Chris are more like the entire body; receiving signals from the brain and actually making them reality. The quality of this album is typified by "Sleepwalker" and "January 33rd". These songs will stick in your head and show you what it means to really build a recording from the ground up.
- wailingcity.com
Discography
"How Come Every TIme We Get Kentucky Fried Chicken It's Raining Outside?"---Full length album
Random airplay on various college stations and a burgeoning
e-following in Turkey and Belarus ( which incidentally happens to be our fave in most Olympic events).
Photos
Bio
his is not so much “the” honey wagon as it is “a” honey wagon. The band consists of Terry Flynn, Chris Moore and J. Curland. At first we wanted to name the band “John” but we soon saw that many other bands were either named John or had a John somewhere in their name. Our band’s name is somewhere in a john, but that’s another story (Bullaro!) . . . We chose the name A Honey Wagon because we figured that nobody else would name their band after a truck that sucks crap out of sewers. The laziness that prevails with many other of the band’s activities led us to the slick assumption that this freed us from the necessity of researching the name to see if any of the other little Internet pirate ships we call local bands were sailing under the same colors. Well, it turns out there are about as many “honey wagons” on the net as there are doing the dirty work in cities and towns all over the world. We are, of course, honored to be in such good company. We imagine if any of these other honey wagons gets rich and famous there will be a hilarious class action lawsuit on behalf of all the other honey wagons out here in cyber-nowhere. We will enjoy this as we get a kick out of those random pieces of mail the lawyers send us to let us know that they have been busy at work fighting for our interests against some random department store. Some of us have seen such mail with as much as six dollars and eighty-two cents that can only be spent at the store we won the lawsuit against. Such serendipity! Three cheers for the class action lawyers...But we here in A Honey Wagon digress. This Honey Wagon started when Terry Flynn cajoled Chris Moore and Phil Bullaro (special thanks to Phil for getting the band up and running as our first drummer) into playing a bunch of boring songs about crap nobody really wants to hear about anyway. He didn’t mean to; the original idea was never to actually form a band, but simply to sit around talking about the music such a band would make. It was going to be easy because it was never supposed to exist anywhere outside the realm of thought. We would all get together and “practice” whenever the mood suited us, which wasn’t often. This particular honey wagon seemed to do just fine with or without our input. After a six month stint without any practice at all, we discovered that they had actually held down a three-night stand at Carnegie Hall. Naturally, this excited us, so we got more and more detailed about just what sort of songs this honey wagon might have. The process progressively got so confusing that we actually started bringing out guitars and drums to help illustrate the things we were trying to describe. Pretty soon, and despite all our efforts to the contrary, we wound up writing a bunch of songs. We really hope you like them. We’re doing our best but compared to the imaginary band we dreamed up so we wouldn’t have to do any of the work, we think we kinda suck crap.---TerryFlynn
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