Austinist New Artist Wednesdays: Flotation Toy Warning
England's Flotation Toy Warning is a band of inventors, academics, and a former flying machine test pilot - most telling of their avant-garde leanings, it was while discussing exotic butterflies over dinner that the five "discovered a common interest in astrophonics and decided to become a musical item." Their debut album, "Bluffer's Guide to the Flight Deck" - released by Austin's own Misra Records - is what would have resulted had Johann Sebastian Bach teamed up with The Flaming Lips. And then smoked a whole lotta pot.
Album opener "Happy 13" plays like a delicate traipse through English woodlands in the Fall. Its lilting harmonies and languid pedaling purposefully refrain from building up to any solid crescendos and maintains - stolidly - an understated, light-footed momentum. Like prologue for the album's eccentric, capricious narrative, lead singer Donald Drusky implores the listener to "take a deep breath / and concentrate now."
Following this is "Popstar Research Oblivion" - paper-thin sheets of gargling vocals carried by the winds of a drawn-out church organ and further buoyed by tinny classical instruments. Segueing into a harp[like] rendition of Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata", the track seems to end on the pressing of a single, solemn piano key, but then adds another one octave higher as an afterthought.
Clocking in just a hair under eternity at eight minutes, the album's third track - "Losing Carolina, For Drusky" - is easily its most ambitious and sonically tapestried. Prefaced with an English-accented gentleman presenting the tale of a woman in the forests of Surrey ("accompanied by a nightingale", no less), the song progresses to a similarly warbling melody like "Popstar" before it - only now, muffled falsettos are supplanted by dreamy instrumentals. Not since Tom Hulce's Oscar-nominated turn as the mad maestro in "Amadeus" have we heard a harpsichord played with such overwrought expression as that which anchors the first half of this track. Absurd? Absolutely! But predicting the unpredictable becomes all but predictable as the song moves into its second half, where we encounter (not chronologically ordered):
(1) an opera singer,
(2) a homemade, half-fashioned musical instrument resembling a cyborg grackle, and
(3) a Hawking-like synthesized voice imparting a final bit of cryptic, gobbledegook philosophy:
"if God failed to appear in court / that only means by civil procedures / that he would lose by default"
And those are just the first three songs. You'll probably hear plenty of references to The Flaming Lips, early Eno, or Mercury Rev - and they're all right, yet still fail to fully describe Flotation Toy Warning. With so many of their English contemporaries arduously mining their country's barely adolescent New Wave past (not that we mind), it's simultaneously impressive and refreshing to hear a band that dug so deep into the dusty archives and discovered something that not even your parents' parents would have found cool - might we be witnessing the rise of indie baroque?
Flotation Toy Warning
"Bluffer's Guide to the Flight Deck"
Misra Records (www.misrarecords.com)
MP3 Downloads:
"Popstar Researching Oblivion" mp3 (Pointy Records UK)
"Fire Engine on Fire Part 2" mp3 (Pointy Records UK)
"Happy 13" mp3 (Misra Records)
