The Halamays

Oh why, hello The Halamays! Yes I do love to dance all geeky girl indie pop style, thank you very much!

The Halamays are a two piece band from Chicago, Katie and Patrick Watkins that create pretty pop music that hooks you in and won't let go until the last song on This Boring Party is finished. I've actually tried to review this EP twice now, but have failed because I just want to squeal "It's so effin awesome!" and that's it.

In 2003, America invaded Iraq, SARS invaded our lungs, and a record titled Give Up by The Postal Service invaded the hearts and minds of aspiring songwriters everywhere. If the record had drawbacks, it was that Ben Gibbard and Jimmy Tamborello's perfect marriage of indie and electronic elements was, perhaps, a little too perfect. Here, exposed, was the blueprint for dressing up singer-songwriter fare in bleeps and bloops, a reason to ditch the acoustic for the chic of a synthesizer. It was a fun, simpler time in music, but it wouldn't last.

Fast-forward to 2011. We are knee-deep in Ariel Pink and Dirty Projectors, dream pop and chillwave. Pop has gone avant-garde and lo-fi (again). It is anything but fun and simple, but don't tell The Halamays. The husband-wife duo, consisting of Katie and Patrick Watkins, are, in their own way, the punkest band I know.

Ostensibly, it's just another "summer fun" record - ping-pong pop with the obligatory girl/boy vox and clap-along synth hooks. But after a few listens, a sneaking suspicion emerges that Chicago husband/wife duo Katie & Pat Watkins (aka The Halamays) are toying with this formula for slightly darker purposes; not unlike the kitten on their album cover with his ball of string.

Watching Chicago's Katie & Pat, the musical fuse burning down to what is now the sparkling and energetic Halamays, was always a feast for the eyes: instruments akimbo spread in a musical smorgasbord across the stage, then at the close of each song Katie and Pat wandering about this war zone of implements and selecting their next weapon.

In K & P, there was a sweetness in the understated, direct verse and lucid creativity in the arrangements, a blossoming of instrumentation, and in the Halamays, that lyricism is given a weight and fullness. It seems appropriate then that the transition songs (the tunnel between bands), two tracks under the name Zombies EP about surviving an apocalypse of the undead, comes at older K & P tracks with fresh angle and inventiveness, an evolution of the sound. This triumphant, redeeming, survivor tone carries through in the Halamays newest EP.

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