Flickerstick - To Madagascar and Back
Rating
RIYL
Pink FloydFoo Fighters
The Flaming Lips
Built To Spill
Radiohead
Label
226 RecordsTracklist
1. Open Up Your Eyes2. Girls & Pills
3. Blue
4. The Tourist
5. All We Are Is Gone
6. Miss Missing You
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A few years ago Flickerstick burst onto the scene with an appearance on VH1's reality show "Bands On The Run." They beat out three really horrible bands and then immediately signed a deal with Epic Records. They released one record on Epic ("Welcoming Home The Astronauts"), had a moderately successful single("Beautiful") and then dropped off the face of the earth. They are back with a 6 song EP to give everyone preview for their next full length scheduled to drop sometime this
summer.
The disc opens with the radio ready single "Open Up Your Eyes." It starts out pedestrian enough and then explodes. Thats something that Flickerstick does very well on this disc. They will nearly lull you to sleep and then BAM! They hit you with a sonic barrage. There are two standout tracks on the EP. The first is "Blue," a six plus minute long musical roller coaster ride. The song starts off almost as a lullaby. Singer Brandin Lea's voice is almost hypnotic, and his vibratto (something that is non existent in today's music scene) draws you in enough to get comfortable and then the song builds into a soaring, electric guitar jam, leaps and bounds beyond even the best that Dave Matthews Band ever dreamt. The other stand out is the Pink Floyd-esque "All We Are Is Gone." The song starts out as a haunting acoustic piece but morphs into distorted guitar solos that Floyd definately would have been proud of.
The thing that brings this work down is what in my opinion hurt WHTA, a lack of lyrical depth. A vast majority of the songs are about sex, drugs women. If you need more than just music to make your album, you will probably be dissapointed. The thing that really hurts though, is that as good as this EP is, it can't even come close to capturing the emotion and power of this band's live performance.
The thing about Flickerstick is that they just don't fit into today's music scene. They fit somewhere between Pink Floyd and Foo Fighters. WHTA was a brilliant record I thought, but it never took off because Flickerstick couldn't find their place in the music mainstream, and that problem continues. This is probably the most promising EP I have ever listened to, however unless the music scene changes soon, the boys from Dallas will never get the recognition they have worked so hard for.
JohnnyL
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