Review: Halo Circus lead a rebellion of ‘Robots & Wranglers’

There is nothing normal about our time. Alarms are ringing. Blood flows through the streets. People are being sacrificed right before our eyes. You might think this is simply hyperbolic speech, but just turn on the evening news or flick through your social timelines. The world is tearing itself apart as we speak; fangs sink into porcelain skin without fear of recourse. “Unprecedented times call for unprecedented action,” alternative duo Halo Circus write in counting down to the release of their sophomore record. It’s a grim but timely statement rippling outward, from the continued stagnation of Flint, Mich. to Trump’s dangerous tweeting to near-daily mass killings. It’s the world we live in, and if we aren’t careful, we’ll become numb. We can’t become numb. We mustn’t.

Halo Circus ⎯⎯ founded on Allison Iraheta’s bone-crushing vocals and Matthew Hager’s striking harmonies and their joint warped production ⎯⎯ turn their furious gaze to the millennium. Robots & Wranglers, a dichotomy of images and notions, from the metallic savagery of machines and screens to the wasted echo of humanity, levels up on musical ambition. Previously, the two musicians handled the pop-rock hybrid (2016’s Bunny) and Americana-fluffed tunes (2017’s The East Lansing Sessions EP) with extreme precision. Their scope was almost magical. Following an unexpected lineup change, from a four-piece down to two, their daring changed along with it. Bred amidst political, social and economic upheaval, the meager eight-song project rushes by in the blink of an eye, as Iraheta and Hager wager our downfall on technology’s exponential growth and utilize electronic-framed excursions as their new home base. “It brings you touch when you have no one / And tells your aching heart that it ain’t frozen,” Iraheta harpoons with “Oh, Money!,” the glitchy opener dethroning the belief “money is the root of all evil.” But instead, as they claim, “We say money is the fruit of our ego.”

Sigmund Freud structured the model of the psyche as the Id, ego and super-ego, three crucial psychological concepts in understanding instinct and moralization. “The functional importance of the ego is manifested in the fact that normally control over the approaches to motility devolves upon it. Thus, in its relation to the id it is like a man on horseback, who has to hold in check the superior strength of the horse; with this difference, that the rider tries to do so with his own strength while the ego uses borrowed forces. The analogy may be carried a little further. Often a rider, if he is not to be parted from his horse, is obliged to guide it where it wants to go; so in the same way the ego is in the habit of transforming the id’s will into action as if it were its own,” he once wrote in lecture form on psychoanalysis, bridging the three parts as one barreling locomotive.

Hager and Iraheta employ these themes in great depth, always encased in this generation’s damaged egomania. On “Narcissist,” they screech through a gruesome reality ⎯⎯ “You get to a point where you wake up, turn to the phone and you’re immersed in that world. Whether you want to be filled in on the daily news and the world’s opinions on it or not, it’s all screaming in your face,” Iraheta explains. The razor-sharp hip-hop curves serve to hammer the message deep into the skull; the membrane quakes. “Do you like the way I drive? / Wanna see me get behind? / A Mack truck and see my die? / While I’m on Facebook live?,” she sings, swinging the maddening truth with aggressive throat-jabs. “Got It Made” picks up the torch, reflecting upon Instagram and Twitter feeds blurring our sense of ownership ⎯⎯ envy and fury flooding into the bloodstream. “Everybody’s privacy is now my curiousity / And you don’t know me,” she taunts as keyboard clicks wash in neutral tones beneath the space-age arrangement. Later, she crows, exultantly, “I can steal everything in front of me / Destroy everything in front of me / Everyone belongs to me.” Social media has recklessly bestowed strangers behind a keyboard with the power to detonate people’s lives, their hearts, souls and minds, with a few clicks and barbed verbiage. It’s utterly terrifying, and Halo Circus attack our way of life eagerly and necessarily.

In “Contact,” embellished with distorted strings and alien-bristled thumps, Iraheta pleads for us to put down our phones. “I would do anything at all, anything for contact,” she screams. The production staggers along, ghoulish vocals thrashing through the squalor. “Commander,” the mid-point of the record, rises like a David Bowie deep cut. It’s phoenix-like talons scrape flesh from their bones. “Whatever happened to us manifesting victories / The pride of power of us rewriting our history,” Iraheta cowers, unmasking her despair over the current political landscape. “Will they greet us bold / Like we did our own so blindly / And kill our hope / Or will they learn from us / That power just corrupts untimely / It all erupts wen you’re keeping score.” She relinquishes hope, albeit slathered in misery, to the next generation, which already shows sings of stepping in to correct the damage done. “Maybe we can hope for innocence,” she wonders.

“Y Para Que,” adjoining peculiar percussion jerks with Iraheta’s Mexican-American heritage, “debates the daily sacrifices and rituals of a modern woman,” she says. Then, the pair devise a more honest “Pledge of Allegiance,” in which they seethe, “If you know violence, then you know me / If you know loss, then you know me / If you know hope, then you know me.” It’s not that they are disrespecting this country’s roots; in fact, they are exposing it all, down to the grisly, decaying core. With “Off the World,” a guitar-laden smokey piece, hope seems to be the lingering element. “She’ll keep believing through it,” Iraheta chants on loop. Electronic blinks and burbs remain stuck on our brains as potent as the setting sun on yet another day of carnage and lawless rulers. Halo Circus are the beacons of the future.

Robots & Wranglers drops Friday (March 16).

Grade: 4 out of 5

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