aaamusic | On 21, May 2012

Holy wow. Y’ever had that moment where a song or an album creeps up on you? Where something starts out as pedestrian but nice enough to keep on listening and lets you lose interest until later, when you come back to it and realize that it’s become absolutely wonderful? Precisely that’s just happened here with San Francisco based indie band Still Flyin’s second album On A Bedroom Wall. With one eye firmly trained on the cool side of eighties synth pop, I.E New Order and another trained on the more modern dream pop stylings of M83, we get something that eventually combines the two and gives us something as ecstatic as it is delectable. The key word there being “eventually”. As good as this record gets it’s not quite great, as I said it takes a while to get going, to the extent that I can’t honestly say whether I would have listened all the way through were I not obligated to do so. However that says more about me than it does the band and when it gets going it’s fantastic… but it does take its sweet time to get there.

It doesn’t help that the opening track is by far the worst thing here, Elsie Dormer stumbles where it should strut, agonizing reverberating tom-tom fills seemingly pilfered from a Phil Collins B-side introducing the track and while it is carried on a neat little guitar hook, the truckloads of reverb mean that nothing else, not the singing, the bass, the keyboards, anything, sticks at all. Then confusingly enough, it ends, seemingly without a chorus or anything memorable beyond the guitar line. The album does improve from then on but it would be hard not to, nothing really special rears its head until the midway mark Cleats Talking, when bass and Kalimba meets to create something joyous enough to give spiritual brethren Architecture in Helsinki a run for their money. After that comes the monstrous one-two punch of Surrender To Me and Camouflage Detector. The latter coming across like a lower key four to the floor Gorillaz single on a sleazy, noir-esque bass line, and the former the most gloriously melancholic synth-pop track since Hercules and Love Affair’s first album, one of the very few times where something so danceable has been so well constructed, and the entire second half could make a mortuary dance.

In total I would be lying if this wasn’t a patchy album, persevere and you’ll find some outrageously good tunes but one does have to get through a lot, put a gun to my head and I’d say it’s worth it but this isn’t an album made to listen to the whole way through. Cut out the first five or so songs and you’d have one of the E.P’s of the year, think of it that way and you’re sorted.

★★★★★

Will Howard