Occasionally you’ll meet a person who instantly reminds you of someone else you know. Perhaps they look uncannily like your best mate from school, or seem to speak identically to an old flame. On the contrary, a complete stranger may instantaneously conjure memories of that bastard who made your life a living hell in that first minimum-wage job you had. You know the guy I mean.
Maybe it’s just me, but when this happens I can’t help but consider the doppelgangers to be basically the same person and to treat the newer of these acquaintances accordingly. It’s only within that context that I can start to write about Flies In All Directions, the new release from San Diego singer-songwriter Brian Warren, aka Weatherbox.
From the minute first track Pagan Baby launches itself out of the speakers and indelibly inscribes itself on your brain, it’s impossible to avoid comparisons with Say Anything and Max Bemis’ distinctive, auteur approach to music – not to mention his sneering, sarcastic-sounding vocal style. I found the familiarity made me immediately embrace the album as if I’d been listening to it for years.
Like Say Anything, or at least their triumphant triumvirate of releases between …Is A Real Boy and Say Anything inclusive, Flies in all Directions has its roots in punk rock but subverts the genre via explicitly self-referential lyrics and deliberately jarring shifts in musical tone.
I may have laboured the Say Anything comparisons but that’s only because so few bands are doing what Weatherbox are doing, or at least doing it well. Don’t be fooled: Flies in all Directions is a fantastic album in its own right. Near-perfectly paced and so eclectic as to make boredom impossible. Dark All Night, for example, starts out as another ‘slow one’, building gently until it hits the two-minute mark and explodes into a pop-punk ear-worm before taking a sharp left turn two minutes later to mutate into a completely different song.
Warren’s professional persona is permeated by a Brechtian desire to prevent his audience from escaping too far into the music industry’s fantasy world. ‘You heard we were a good band, well you didn’t hear it from us’ he sings on the aforementioned lead-off track. Radio Hive’s hook of ‘we pull-off, we hammer-on’ refers to guitar-playing techniques involving playing directly on the frets rather than picking the string; it may be a metaphor but it’s all part of a very deliberate campaign to make music that won’t allow the listener forget that they’re listening to the result of a creative process.
The album’s title acts, by design I’m sure, as a description of its content. From fuzz-filled, guitar-driven bounciness on Bring Us the Head of Weatherbox to the electro-indie-pop of Bathin’ in the Fuss, Weatherbox manage to pull off the difficult trick of skipping between genres without ever losing their sense of identity. Weatherbox sound nothing like Manchester Orchestra, yet when Andy Hull’s voice appears towards the end of The Devil and I it makes perfect sense within the context of that track.
An exciting and innovative release, Flies in all Directions has arrived just in time for Summer and I’ll be amazed if it doesn’t find itself the sound track to countless barbecues as the weather(box) continues to improve. 2014 has so far been a fantastic year for alternative music with storming releases by Bayside, Manchester Orchestra, Against Me! et al. You can add Weatherbox to that list; impressive stuff.