Flight Metaphor’s debut album Trapdoors and Ladders is about the ups and downs of life, but there isn’t much dynamism in their songwriting. Upon completion, I felt like I had listened to thirteen takes of the same song with slightly different intros. It’s an album that’s not unpleasant, but not hard to fall asleep to. I guess, if I had to pick the two best-quality examples of the Flight Metaphor sound, they would be “In Our Bones” and the titular closing track. These tracks contain very thoughtful and relatable lyrics and well-crafted arrangements which make the songs feel more epic than they actually are. When I’d heard them, I felt like I’d just read a book for young adults. Clearly, that’s what this band was going for. They depend completely on your ability to relate to their lyrics and wistful mood. And if you are a devout Christian in a suicidal exhaustion of loneliness and recreational drug abuse, well this album is for you.
The band's influences include eighties new wave and nineties alternative, and that guise dominates the playing time. But every once in a while, Flight Metaphor throws in a little musical wrinkle. In “Flat on your Face,” interesting repeated single wah notes change things up. In “I-29,” there is the one and only example on this CD of what I would call a guitar solo. Every song has little drum rolls here and there to feign power. And just to flout your expectations, they clandestinely swipe the melody from “The Breakup Song” by Greg Kihn in “Bird Flying Red.” These guys don’t care about impressing you. They are all about subtlety. Everything is about a mood. There is a distinctive blend of guitar tones, starting right from the opening notes, that is at once woeful and nostalgic, and never goes away through the thirteen tracks of the album. I would call it the defining sound of the CD. It gives off the artistic aura of the Charlie Kaufman character in the movie Adaptation, who says, “I just want to write about flowers.” This album is only trying to be good, not great.
The singer, Mike Harvat, is very adept at emotional intonation and displays a great amount of talent on Trapdoors and Ladders. One obvious influence for the vocalist is The Cure. Another is Radiohead. The Flight Metaphor vocalist can be positively compared to both singers. That should play extremely well in Omaha, where a vocalist is instantly considered a genius if he sounds anything like The Cure. Combining Harvat’s talents with his knack for relatable, sentimental lyrics, the band’s woeful guitar tone, and the somewhat peppier, punk rhythms that occasionally show up on the album, Flight Metaphor shows itself capable of writing a great song, one that is at once heartbreaking and inspiring, heartthrob-ish and introspective. And taken in isolation, these tracks could reasonably be described as such. But that’s just it. I just listened to a one song album with thirteen tracks.
RATING: 2.5 STARS OUT OF 5
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