Treetop Flyers : To Bury The Past EP
Released: Out Now!!!
Label: Unsigned
The Treetop Flyer’s cordially invite you to shovel up and get digging for all kinds of 1970’s folk rock nuggets from beneath the sweltering checker shirted grave stones of bands like Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and Buffalo Springfield as they proceed to reinstate a buried musicology. To Bury The Past wraps itself up long enough to keep warm from the dangers of serious innovation. This does not mean however that I feel the bile of blandness raise too rapidly it just means I’m expecting something more as life and time progress.
'Mountain Song' doesn’t help itself at first by mere way of the title. I always switched over from The Waltons on Sunday afternoons and surely that was all about mountains? Plus, only the Fleet Foxes (as far as I’m aware currently) can get away with lining their tracks full of the peripatetic knurled wood wheeling rural wonderer imagery. Oh and of course Ray La Montagne who is much bearded which is his excuse. I’d also like to add that Treetop Flyers sounds like a game played outside by ten year olds or the longed for piece of plastic we all used to get free in packets of Frosties. Right then, where was I? 'Mountain Song' is a bits song. By this I mean it has some good bits in it that suggest promise but is mostly a tad too diluted. There are elements that lift me, but they are overshadowed by over washed grey areas. It’s a track that throws out ideas that could be improved to the benefit of the overall product. My immediate dissatisfaction is also part of a pop sensibility disease I suffer from in great chunks which I will pursue in more detail down the line. The point is the track is average.
'Rose Is In The Yard' is the quick, much needed pick me up. It is also pleasantly surprising and shows a band on the point of fruition rescuing what seemed to be their original intention. This track still holds true to the past which they are trying to bury (excuse the removal from context) yet presents it in a much improved light, not shadowy campfire light.
The next track, 'Is It All Worth It?' is performed and produced with surety and established ties to sweetly plucked country chord arrangements. It starts off in the vein of James Taylor until the singer plums out the first choky lines. But it still sounds like James Taylor. But James Taylor was better. But James Taylor was also a product of his time. I ponder.
'Old Days' and 'It’s About Time' form an accurate representation of the middle wondering path trodden by this band. The problem I have with this record is plenty of bands are delivering this image and back-to-the-country-roots style as if so suggest their lyrics and guitar strings have been wrought from the cast iron anxieties of the inhabitants about the Mississippi river. I get it. Or maybe I don’t. I think I can at least see what they’re trying to achieve. They have got competition on this front in the form of bands like Kill It Kid and the Fleet Foxes. This first contribution is nice, it’s unremarkable, but I do see something in this group and they are still traipsing the borders of infancy. Along with all their revivalist tendencies is a lack of great songs. That more than anything is what bugs me.
Words: Phillip Cogger
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