Ben + Vesper, husband-and-wife duo of the same names, are new members to Daniel Smith’s Sounds Familyre family. Accordingly, their latest album, All This Could Kill You, is a challenging, creative expression featuring lyrical non-sequiturs, experimental melodic diversions aplenty, and labelmate Sufjan Stevens on banjo, piano, and assorted woodwinds.
Forging through dense thickets of lyrical abstractions without verse-chorus structure, Ben + Vesper’s voices lead the way to somewhere sweet yet unsettling. Their vocals are almost always sung simultaneously in equal measure, with Ben’s smooth and smarmy Elvis Costello croon as a harmonic foil to Vesper’s gentle trills. Though it’s hard not to be smitten by their singing, their tunes are far from love songs narrating their courtship or morning breakfast routine.
More concerned with imagery than clarity, they present ideas with very little pay-off that dwindle into boring nothings. The worst instances are when they use deliberately dated phrases like “four-and-twenty” (“Nite Walker”), when they try too hard for wordplay, ie: “Why the long face? Recreate, recreate / I can take you to Long Beach” (“Force Field”), or try a pretentious combination of foreign phrases, jazzy tempos, and a flute (“8 Mo”).
It’s not all bad, though; the picking is divine in the almost-catchy tune “An Honest Bluff,” and “Rockaway Twp.” begins like an understated soul record that may or may not be about Stonehenge. For all their strained obscurity, they still manage fleeting moments when their voices transcend any need to understand, and the nonsense sounds like it’s coming from the mouths of angels.
– Kristen Grayewski
Ben + Vesper (Sounds Familyre)