Review: Honestly hypnotize with debut album, ‘Inside Your Eyes, Without You Beside Me’

(Independent)

Dalton Winters suffered one of life’s trusty blows. His heart mangled into ribbons, he thought he’d never recover from a heartbreak so severe, it left him gaping for air. His musical co-conspirator Eric Canto, with whom he comprises east coast duo Honestly, a synth-pop pair with roots firmly in punk music, encouraged Winters to filter emotions of anger and sorrow through a glossy lens. With their debut album, Inside Your Eyes, Without You Beside Me, Winters gathers up the misery and holds it to the fire, stoking 10 songs with waves of effervescence and charm laced up with visceral songwriting.

“I saw my future every time we kissed / Now you’re all I see when I close my eyes / I’ve risked my life for love,” Canto carves around the hole where his heart should be, with a deceptively lush “Without You.” As lead vocalist, Canto merges Winters’ story into his own: breakups are among the most universal experiences, so as he stretches elastic soundscapes with a creamy vocal, you feel ever syllable as diamonds scraped across gravel. The emotional expedition ⏤ vaulting from sweaty, rave-soaked euphoria (“7/13”) and doe-eyed lovesickness (“Inside Your Eyes”) to charred fallout (“Hell”) ⏤ appears overlaid with a dazzling cosmos, twinkling musicality underlining the full breadth of the rise and fall.

Winters and Canto deviate little from their signature starbursts, live guitar and drums clinking in the background to meld into a magical cloud. Inside Your Eyes, Without You Beside Me reads as “a poetic audiobook with a soundtrack,” as Winters puts it. “San Francisco” is the obvious “radio hit,” configuring glowing neons against a chewy canvas, and “IWAYF” flickers with an equally intense velocity. Later on, the record sinks into teary introspection, an expected side-effect once those cheek-flushed early emotions flake away. “Waking Up” slips through piano chords, setting up two-songs later for the celestial finale, “Warm Flowers,” a proper adieu while still lingering inside heartbreak’s sting. They’re not wallowing; rather, they’re memorializing what it means to be human. And sometimes, reliving that pain is inescapable.

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