At the start of The Cinnamon Band’s recent set at Outback Lodge, one of the band’s members—either guitarist John Harouff or drummer Neil Campbell—leaned into a microphone and announced in a sly, clear voice: “Cut the shit, start the pit.” It’s a testament to the band’s power as a live act that, for an instant, I expected a chasm to open up in the middle of the room.
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In some respects, The Cinnamon Band had a rough show that night. Harouff had trouble hearing his vocals through a monitor, and it seemed to color his mood a bit; later, when he passed me a copy of the band’s first release, the five-song Buena Vista EP, he spoke humbly about the scope of the album. But I understand Harouff’s modesty: At its best, The Cinnamon Band is a two-piece band that sounds more like a five-piece, a minimal act whose impact is expansive, all-consuming—but only when every element fits together just so.
Fortunately, it’s a dynamic that Harouff and Campbell know how to execute. In the late ’90s, the pair pulled off a similar “small boys, big noise” feat as two-thirds of The Union of a Man and a Woman—an act signed to Darius Van Arman’s Jagjaguwar record label when the band members were still in high school. With Buena Vista, The Cinnamon Band restrains the elements that made Union a formidable act—lets them build like water slowly filling a house until the walls crack and the structure falls swimmingly down.
Of course, every house needs a foundation. Buena Vista’s opening title track sets a template for the group—drums that only know crescendo, vocal melodies that only know how anthems sound or feel, guitars that set simple patterns and progressions, then look for ways to snap them.
And if the brilliance of The Cinnamon Band is in the slow build, the fun is in the breakdown. Campbell crumbles the towering tension of “Buena Vista” during the first eight bars of “To Cool You,” sledgehammering his drum kit like he was wrecking piñatas or splitting logs. One of the record’s highlights, it also shows Harouff’s knack for turning a phrase: Over squalls of feedback and organ buzz, Harouff carefully swaps “Too cool to warm to” with “Too kind to be cruel to you,” then shows his hand: “Just trying to cool you.”
A distracting bit of noodling opens the middle track, “Keep On Rolling.” Neither an ascending nor a descending point in the album, the song feels like something of a plateau—not a low point, simply a bit flat. But within minutes, Harouff and Campbell gather a bit of momentum for “On One Hand,” barbed like the post-punk of early U2, bombastic as Springsteen’s Darkness on the Edge of Town.
“On One Hand” eases into “Yer Bluff,” the second half of a brilliant final combo—the pair of songs shrinks from earthquake to tremors to the settling of dust. And as Harouff belts over spare drums towards the song’s conclusion—“Nobody’s gonna call my bluff/ Even singing at the top of my lungs/ No way I’m gonna wake anybody up”—the band seems primed for a final, explosive swing at the track’s remaining tension.
Instead, Campbell and Harouff are content to let the dust settle and the tension persist. But there’s something to be said for the pair’s restraint alongside its power. After all, bands use the same tools to build things up and break them down again. The Cinnamon Band just happens to be one of the best bands I’ve heard at doing both.