BEN + VESPER
Issue #32
All This Will Kill You
By Jonathan Shipley
Published: June 1st, 2007 | 12:00am
To categorize Ben + Vesper is an impossibility, but, if pressed, the married duo are like a folky Magnetic Fields or perhaps a staid Crash Test Dummies. Through the 14 melodies on All This Will Kill You, Ben’s striking voice swoons and croons while Vesper breathes harmonies behind him like the wind.
The duo made its sophomore effort in good company. Danielson’s Daniel Smith produced and recorded, and his sibling David provided percussion. Renaissance man Sufjan Stevens also lends a hand to the proceedings, playing his trademark instruments like piano and banjo, among others.
“An Honest Bluff” starts off quickly like a classic Tears for Fears song with fast-strumming guitars before Ben + Vesper jump into the fray, shuffling along with the drums. “The Stomach,” with its simple guitar and Ben’s trance-like voice, is like an odd chant performed in a pagan ceremony deep in the woods before there’s some cheery Disney-like whistling thrown in the mix. “Nite Walker,” one of the duo’s strongest efforts in the album, is a beautiful song, like a sunset over a rural small town’s water tower.
Each track has its own Ben + Vesper stamp of ethereal poppiness, yet listening to the entire album is wearisome — the quiet crescendos and decrescendos become formulaic, the voices sedative. It’s best to listen to All This Will Kill You while, as the duo suggests on their Web site, “doing the dishes or lying on the couch or talking on your cell on the train in a tunnel.” The album won’t, um, kill you, but it’ll make you happily woozy with its quiet quirkiness.
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