Willie J Healey – ‘Bunny’ album review: a delectable soul delight
A well-engineered bass sound is a thing of beauty, and Michelangelo will have done well to carve out the marvellous rumble that struts its way right through Willie J Healey‘s new album, Bunny. The album is a stark departure from the blueprint of his debut, Twin Heavy. That contrast is a mark of his unbridled boldness when it comes to experimenting with sounds and styles, backed up by his knack for crafting a golden groove.
That dexterity when it comes to groove is the fundamental ingredient that makes Bunny a triumph. Sometimes, when an artist veers into a new sound, they get overwhelmed by the invigoration this new lease gives them and end up caught up on the ‘sound’ itself rather than what to do with it thereafter. Every track on Bunny, however, swaggers to the tune of a different topline. Put simply, it offers up a repertoire of soul-funk hits as opposed to a soul-funk soundboard. Thus, it simply never stops being luscious.
In this liberated vein, Healey is even happy to veer towards lounge rock departures for the likes of ‘Black Camaro’ and ‘Little Sister’ which add an aura of retro to the record as though you’re cruising along on an evening drive in 1974 listening to the coolest AM radio station in Atlanta. And yet this never feels novelty owing to the deftly innovative production throughout, helping to bring a new twist to the ’70s sounds.
Alas, there are moments when the album embraces gimmickry a little too wholeheartedly, throws in one production layer too many, shuns refinery, or is a tad samey for a fleeting second. But all this is forgiven for the overall joy that it brings to your dismal day—in fact, any minor flaws are the mere side-effects of one of the best possible ambitions for an artist: to throw themselves into music that makes people happy.
It is self-evident that Healey is not only going to make fans happy with his smooth cruising songs, but that he – along with the four core musicians, revolving list of guest stars, and Loren Humphrey at the production desk – all had a ball. And as the old cliche goes, if the band are having a good time, then the audience is going to have one too. Somehow, the ebullience of riffing on experimented sounds infects the vinyl of Bunny and whirls up like a plume of the seductive smell that oozes from a curry house when you give the wax a spin. And much like the culinary come hither of that Indian restaurant, Bunny‘s enrapturing sounds urge you to juice life down to the pith.
That is reflected thematically, too. He celebrates the little things like his friend Jamie T borrowing him a drum machine, which actually turned out to be a big thing – which Kurt Vonnegut will tell you is often the case – as it went on to dictate the sound of the album. As for the larger topics, he braces these and brushes them aside with a light upbeat too. This all plays out with quirky phrasing like “If she says I’m mud, consider me stuck,” but often the rhymes simply roll into a melody, which is swell enough because the melodies are engrossingly catchy, but it’s also proof that his idiosyncratic lyricism is still in development, and it will go further.
A buoyant effort, Bunny embraces counterpoint throughout, harbouring a retro soul in a fresh wallop of layered studio sounds, with a voice that says ‘Don’t sweat the small stuff’ and beautifully contoured grooves that follow that with the affirmation that ‘it’s all small stuff’.
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