Honest Engines

"Keeping pop purity at a comfortable distance from anything resembling sentimentality." - Redeye Chicago

Both inspirational and entertaining; local Chicago band Honest Engine’s six song album is a sweet reminder of how music is supposed to make you feel. Each song flows into the next making the album a complete work of art rather then a collection of mindless, radio friendly singles. This album is uplifting with inspiring lyrics and hypnotizing instrumentation.

Honest Engines have the talent to pull in their listener from the first song and never let them go. Even when the album stops playing, the music in your head does not. Catchy lyrics in such tracks as ‘To The Quick’ or the title track ‘University’ stay with the listener well after even the first note.

Even the weakest song on the album “From the Pier I’ll Push Away: can hardly be considered weak do to its amazing drums and guitar. However tracks such as “Sweet Familiar Doubt,” “Mannequins” and well, just about every other song on the album more then make up for Pier’s lyrical flaws.

This album is a must listen, and as soon as you do once, you have no other choice but to want to listen to it again.

It is refreshing to hear an unsigned local Chicago band have as crisp of a recording as Honest Engines do. Honest Engines should stand as an example for aspiring local musicians, no matter what city they reside in.

These guys got talent, sit down and take a listen.



-Liz Catalano
Second Wave Music

liz@secondwavemusic.com
www.secondwavemusic.com - Second Wave Music

"Honest Engines prides itself in lyrical juxtaposition and poetic imagery that likely looks as beautiful on drafts of scrap paper as it sounds when sung in each other's company. Mulcahy writes a lot - and it shows"

-Lisa Balde/Entertainment Editor - The Daily Herald

Honest Engines

gently bumped
by fuzzy cue ball
spheres hiding
behind the visible
world your what
appear to be
decisions to the outside
world lead you
across the meadow
with the other
fuzzy sheep blossoming
bulging white
flower - traces of
your motion
history on the nappy
skull you and
that world share


-Thax Douglas
myspace.com/thaxdouglas
youtube.com/thaxdouglas - Thax Douglas

If you need to keep warm this winter, you should get real close to the Honest Engines. Akin to the Flaming Lips, Electric Soft Parade, and Robyn Hitchcock, one of Chicago’s finest indie bands has mastered the art of modernizing classic pop song-craft with an idiosyncratic panache (it used to be called “style” in the old days) and has also figured out a way make it sound as if this engaging EP was recorded in a major studio with a noted producer. Unfortunately I cannot afford kudos to the individuals as the cover art is devoid of any names - including the musicians! Nonetheless the Engines observe the human condition with a nod, a wink and pop hooks. Witness the scared young man in “From The Pier I’ll Push Away” as he intones “like a cancer/you are coming/I’m a cold foot ed groom/eve of wedlock running,” only to be thwarted with a wicked reggae groove in the bridge which effectively resolves the dilemma. The title of this collection emerges from “University” a bitter shuffle punctuated by menacing guitar motifs and sweet falsetto harmonies. “Sweet Familiar Doubt” displays the singer confused by love whilst his band renders harmonies ala Brian’s Beach Boys. Just when you thought indie rock was getting stale, these Engines keep it honest and fresh. But why can’t we talk of California?

--Tom Semioli [January 12, 2009] - Amplifier Magazine

Layered, textured, and mature, there’s something moderately sad and somber in the underbelly of Honest Engines’s music. In “Mannequins,” Mulcahey laments a pressing, personal struggle to view the world as he sees it, rather than what it should be: “Beautiful flowers are skull bones to me … I’m tired of making it hardly.” Much of the album explores related feelings. And though a lot of great art encompassing similar attributes tends to bore, Honest Engines approaches its music with an honesty few up-and-coming bands dare (or care) to explore.

—Brent Steven White (B.A. '08) - Demo Magazine