It's never going to be easy to make Christian-themed music for the indie set and find a large, receptive audience. Half-Handed Cloud ringleader John Ringhofer has gone about it in the smartest way possible, aligning with artists unafraid to express their spirituality, like Sufjan Stevens (Ringhofer is a long-time member of the Illinoisemakers) and Daniel Smith of Danielson, who helped mix this album, Half-Handed Cloud's fifth full-length. Here, amidst the short, choppy tunes, Ringhofer is even more forthcoming in his concept, assembling an album "where water serves as a surrogate body for God." But Ringhofer's anxious, exhaustive approach makes As Stowaways a hard sell.
The music shifts, starts, stops, and shifts again in uncomfortable ways. By packing each minute with a mess of hairpin turns and giddy rhythmic fluctuations, he's made it difficult to form any sort of emotional connection with the material here. By the time you've spent 10 minutes with the album, you feel like you are overdue for a breather. That said, Ringhofer clearly knows what he's doing and has a specific effect in mind. The songs are able to turn on a dime and are crafted with great attention to detail. And the excitement in their creation is palpable. Sometimes, the songs have an appeal reminiscent of a hyper-caffeinated Shins, with the addition of a refined sense of quirkiness that evokes a Mark Mothersbaugh score for a Wes Anderson movie. And the introduction of sweet but fleeting patches of string and horn work is welcome, especially as a respite from Ringhofer's zigzagging songs.
But while it's clear that a lot of love went into As Stowaways, it's ultimately hard to keep up. The songs are jarring and all over the place, which is a real problem, but the focus is lost in other ways, too. Ringhofer often delivers these anecdotes and thoughts in an irritatingly cheeky manner that makes it hard to form any spiritual or emotional connection, and his pinched voice is an acquired taste, to put it mildly. For such a hyperactive record, As Stowaways weirdly becomes a rather passive listening experience, difficult to penetrate beyond its busy surface.
