Close couples often develop their own shared language, a matrix of references and associations that hold unique meaning for the pair. A husband and wife who record and perform music together would seem like strong candidates for being so intuitively intertwined. It'd certainly go a long ways towards explaining the strange folk-pop made by Ben + Vesper.
The world of marrieds Ben and Vesper Stamper is an appealingly odd one, where mundane chores and concerns rub shoulders with snatches of allusive poetry. A typical song on Honors, the duo's sophomore full-length release, will fancifully sketch an image of birds that "soar above and back and forth in woolly skirts" and then moments later earnestly ask, "Are you getting six-plus hours?/ Is your will and testament in order?" Actions and situations that might seem banal had they been laid out as conventional narrative get infused with wonder and intrigue when placed under the Stampers' stream-of-consciousness spell. "Cell phone rings, a mother sings/ Or shopping for a bathing suit," the pair reports, but before you have a chance to find the thread, they've moved on to imaginatively observing, "Carpet socks and static shocks/ Children wield electron fields."
Ben + Vesper's music, while superficially your standard organic-feeling indie-folk, also seems solely beholden to its own internal logic, with melodic passages frequently broken up by abrupt riffs or discordant tangents. Such persistent tonal shifts theoretically suit the lyrics well, but they lack oomph and often set the duo's songs to meandering when sharper contrasts might've been genuinely thrilling. I look at what Ben + Vesper are doing as being conceptually similar to the Fiery Furnaces or even Pavement. The difference is that the Friedbergers and Stephen Malkmus invest their hodgepodge lyricism with abundant urgency, turning nonsense or banalities into fervent mantras and giving their quixotic tales the push and pull of real drama.
The Stampers, meanwhile, shy away from the loud-soft dynamics that could make even their most obtuse lyrical wanderings feel charged with clear-eyed significance, and only occasionally grasp the importance of giving their listeners an anchor amidst all the associative leapfrogging. When they do hit on a refrain, however, the effect is always galvanizing, and it really doesn't even matter what words they're intoning-- "Style went to sleep tonight," "Label your junk or lose it," and "Thanks to a fireball" all work just fine when repeated several times with obvious feeling. Those phrases all look pretty inscrutable on the page, but it's in these moments that Ben + Vesper most sound like they're speaking a language everyone can understand.
