Genre: Rock Year: 2004 Country: USA Official Site: Halfahalo Details: Tracks & Audio Label: D.U.P. Records
Linkin Park mixes a little rap sensibility with hard rock, a once-revolutionary sound (well before Linkin Park) that we've all come to regard as status quo. One singer sings and shrieks, the other does his best white-boy rap, and the rest of the band rock. Hard.
Halfahalo plays a balancing game, too, but one more familiar to Queens of the Stone Age fans: mix stark guitar riffs, then choruses of pounding drums and overdriven guitars with a good singer … somebody who can hold a note and sing a good melody with some studio self-harmonies. It's a formula that proves that the yelling can be done by the instruments, not the singer (of course, I'm ignoring every Queens song sung by the band's co-singer, whose roaring howls send chills up my spine in a good way).
It's too bad Halfahalo's chief songwriter and singer, Dave Thompson, finds it necessary to temper his band's crisp hard rock sound and his high voice and occasional falsetto with a bass player who, according to the liner notes, is responsible for "screamo vocals." John Pegg just sounds silly in a song like "Losing Sound." He is a competent growling "scream vocalist" — certainly no shame in that for your typical death-metal band or the modern extremely fast, dark heavy metal my little brother listens to.
Still, I feel even wishy-washy about this, as Pegg sounds great on "The King & I," when he gets to sing the song himself, not being relegated only to just the growling pre-chorus or chorus, but breaking into a rhythmic verse of spoken word, thankfully without the hip-hop affect of Linkin Park's rapper.
Pegg should get to sound like more than the "screamo vocal" necessary for today's rock credibility.
Halfahalo's music is a good mix of hard rock and listenability, again akin to Queens of the Stone Age, but I'm only half convinced the formula works here.
Maybe with a 10- to 12-track album, not a six-song EP, I'll fall one way or the other.
Halfahalo The Thrashing Floor
