Acoustic music doesn’t have to be pastoral by design. It can be electrifying, powered by beats, and even lyrical to the point of replacing the demand for traditional verses. If there’s a goal that Bettman & Halpin had when making their new record Timeless, it was proving this very point, and they do so all too masterfully in songs like “What a Lovely Day,” “Accentuate the Positive,” “Cry Me a River,” and the formidable “Blue Skies.” Instead of taking the surreal look that a lot of their peers are employing when making retro-stylized content, Bettman & Halpin want to present themselves with duality here, and they certainly win my favor for doing so.
URL: https://www.bettmanandhalpin.com/
Tempo is often a mood-setter in Timeless, with intriguing numbers like “It Don’t Mean a Thing” and “Miss Otis Regrets” using rhythm to induce emotions that lyrics simply can’t do on their own. “All of Me” uses an urgency that doesn’t need overwhelming percussive strength behind it to get us swinging along to anything the strings can throw in our direction, and I would even argue that its Django Reinhardt-reminiscent arrangement is made all the more powerful by the absence of drums altogether.
I absolutely love the flow of this tracklist, and because of the way that the material has been constructed to run together as opposed to coming across like separate movements of the same operatic story, it feels as though we’re listening to more of a concert than a studio album. It’s difficult to capture the rawness of such an occasion from within the four walls of a recording space, but if you were going off of these incarnations of “Moon River,” “Nature Boy,” or “Autumn Leaves,” you would never be able to guess as much. This is an LP made with a lot of heart, and you don’t have to be a serious music fan to recognize that.
I couldn’t resist the vocal harmonies in “It’s Only a Paper Moon,” the slightly countrified “What a Lovely Day” and the insurgent “It Don’t Mean a Thing,” and I think that these harmonies do a lot to compensate for the lack of instrumental depth outside of the vibrant fretwork in this record. Bettman & Halpin owe us nothing but a good time in these performances, but they’re not just banging out familiar tunes for the heck of it in Timeless; they’ve got stories to be told, and they’re able to tell them through a lens of commonality too often abused in modern pop.
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Refreshingly original and startlingly more cohesive than I was expecting it to be, Bettman & Halpin’s Timeless is too good to put down once you’ve picked it up for the very first time. While it’s true that Americana is coming back in fashion like nobody’s business at the moment, few of the acts that I’ve been covering have been giving the aesthetic the kind of tender love and care that this duo is doing in their new album, and despite this being one of the only times I’ve heard their work, it’s obvious they’ve got potential that goes on for miles.
Claire Uebelacker