Album Review: Human Heat Show How All Is Too Much During Breakups
I am literally feeling Human Heat. This band’s new album, All Is Too Much, feels like Bill Withers and Bon Iver decided to create an album together about heartache and major life-changes. From break-ups to moving into a new home, Human Heat has dedicated its newest record about feeling bombarded with life. All Is Too Much is smooth, electro R&B for every moment you felt exactly like that.
We all have have days where we, literally, wanted to enter fetal position in the middle of a sidewalk, and say, “Okay, Life! I’m Done!”. There are moments when you feel so dangerously vulnerable and uncertain about your future that you wish life had a breathing room you can step into and away from your day. Although this feeling may be rough, Human Heat makes it feel easy and even better. His voice has a daunted delicacy in tracks like, “Close To My Chest”, “Remember When”, and “Your Flaws”. Any person who hears lead singer Alex Schaaf will feel dared not to cry with how poignantly he captures feeling torn by someone you loved, and still willing and wanting to run into their arms. Is that not the irony of romance? For however bad it ends, it takes awhile to let go of the hope that it will get better. Human Heat’s All Is To Much is bounces with succulent rhythms that make you want to slow dance with your lover “Best For You” or cry for him in “2 Is A Stranger”. I think I have written about this in nearly 20 million reviews, but I will always feel stumped by how love unites two people as one, but then can leave them as strangers. That perplexing paradox is founded in this record with looping harmonies that make you feel surrounded by angels repeating the same question, “What happened?”. With each synth-wave and piano key surfing through your mind to crash and froth over this incessant question, Human Heat become the most delicate approach to a rather fragile situation: breakups.
I have to say this is SUCH a wonderful debut. Human Heat’s All Is Too Much is so precise and purposeful in its initiative to sonically nosedive into spiritual territory: the end of a relationship. Moreover, Schaaf’s voice hypnotizes with its serenity. He seems so vocally still in he painful lyrics, he might as well be the vocal equivalent of a titanium pillar in a typhoon. How he stands in his vulnerability to learn to move forward in his life makes Human Heat as a band, and All Is Too Much as an album one TO LISTEN! so Click Here to Buy on September 15.
