Most Likely To: find a small, fervent audience somewhere. But where?
Even though most of Half-Handed Cloud’s songs clock in at under 2:00, it’s hard to sum up Stowaways, the sixth full-length release from singer and multi-instrumentalist John Ringhofer.
Here are the facts: As Half-Handed Cloudn Ringhofer is one-man band, but he has also backed Sufjan Stevens and Danielson. A military brat who was raised on Hawaii, he now lives rent free as a caretaker of a Berkeley, California church. Ringhofer’s voice resembles They Might Be Giants’ John Linnell, and he shares a similar songwriting aesthetic with TMBG. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that like Linnell, Ringhofer also plays the accordion, but that’s probably where the similarity between the two men ends. Mainly because of Ringhofer writes explicitly Christian music, which couldn’t be further from TMBG’s secular, irreverent material.
Ringhofer is probably very much at home on Asthmatic Kitty, where the label’s most famous resident is also known for espousing the Word. But As Stowaways in Cabinets of Surf, We Live-out in Our Members a Kind of Rebirthis no Seven Swans. Thanks to the extremely fast tempos on most tracks, it’s easy to miss much of what Ringhofer says. Stowaways is not quite as overtly religious in tone as 2006’s Halos & Lassos, where Ringhofer examined how “the unbelievers” seem “like they’re doing fine / when I’ve worshipped all this time. Have I followed you for nothing, Lord?” On Stowaways, Ringhofer name checks Jesus, but so did the Velvet Underground, so that is surely no acid test for piety.
Ringhofer’s music definitely offers something that has nothing to do with Christianity: he’s unabashedly strange. Consider the lyrics from “Splashdowns Hold the Hymnal Together”: “You wear SCUBA gear and I’m inside an astronaut suit / We place our gloves on a pew.” His words sound more like Saturday morning cartoons than the stuff of a Sunday hymnal. His ability to just be himself, instead straining to be eternally pious, keeps Stowaways from becoming unbearable.
The album’s biggest flaw is structural. The song ideas move so quickly from one to the next that it’s hard to engage with any of Stowaways‘ 25 tracks. Ringhofer never lets his ideas develop. Instead, he leaves them in a pile and runs off to develop another melodic, but equally incomplete thought.
It is precisely because he is never able to craft a complete song that Ringhofer’s tunelets will never enjoy the wide acceptance experienced by an artist like Stevens. He may, however, save a few kids with really conservative parents from having to listen to the vapid dreck that tops the Billboard Christian chart on a given week. And for that he deserves praise… even from the unbelievers.
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