Normally known for making garage punk as part of bands like
Natural Child and Gary Wrong Group, Benny Divine (Ben McCullough) morphs into a cosmic new age synthwave guru for his solo project,
Bênní. The 11 songs on
I & II cover a lot of ground, from talkbox-driven robot rock to soundtracks for driving around Mars in some sort of hypersonic drag racer. They don't sound like garage rock, but they do retain a rugged quality rather than sounding pristine, polished, and crystalline. This is new age for alien biker gangs, not yoga. After the opening piano-heavy "Night Theme," "Pyrran Control Station" sets the scene with a chugging midtempo rhythm and copious amounts of synth soloing. "Ard'rian's Theme" is music for a daytime soap opera trapped in slowly melting space fuzz. "Night Theme (Reprise)" blows the opening number up into a sleazy electro-disco epic, with dirty, fizzy synth pulsations and some truly bugged-out ring modulations during the solo. "Stardance" features cybernetic vocals about "robots rising up from the sky," although the voice has an accent that makes it sound like it's saying "rowboats" instead of "robots." Following the lovely, shimmering instrumental "1000," the cyborg voice returns on "More Than Man (Machine Supreme)," a robot doom anthem that sounds like
Bruce Haack providing the theme song to some sort of action-packed, laser-filled thriller where no human has a chance of surviving. The mandroid keeps delivering terror-filled statements such as "my power knows no bounds" and "your life will end someday, but we are here to stay" over a bouncy plastic rhythm.
Bênní is highly skilled without seeming like a virtuoso, and he's crafted a debut album bursting with ideas, yet it never seems like his ambitions are out of reach. ~ Paul Simpson