Talk about a strange trajectory,
Sky Eats Airplane's debut album,
Everything Perfect on the Wrong Day, was not only released exclusively online, at first (only making it to CD a year later, in 2007), but was recorded by a partial band consisting of just vocalist Brack Cantrell and guitarist/programmer Lee Duck. OK, perhaps this is in fact a very modern, new millennium trajectory, the way things are going. At any rate, this hardly posed a problem, fundamentally speaking, for the duo, given their chosen sound: electronics-based Nintendo-core in the vein of
Horse the Band and Ghengis Tron -- which hardly requires a full complement of musicians to execute. But what did raise some concerns was the album's first half, which consisted primarily of minute-long song snippets ("By All Means, Captain," "Patterns," "Exit Row") that seemed to be only vaguely connected to each other, and, what's worse, weren't all that emotionally fulfilling, either. Luckily, longer, though anything but conventionally arranged, songs like "Honest Hitchhikers Asking for Cash Handouts," "Giants in the Ocean," and "The Opposite Viewed in Real Time" followed in due course; yet these too proved just as stylistically schizophrenic as those snippets, while frankly offering very little that the aforementioned bands hadn't already done before, and better. This doesn't mean that A.D.D.-afflicted youths won't find plenty of positive stimuli from imaginatively unpredictable highlights like creepy closer, "The Messenger," the robot ballad "She's Just a Glitch," or the title track and its very special guest vocalist, Pac-Man. But whether such recklessly combined elements of the mechanical and the human kinds will stick beyond their obvious novelty value is another matter entirely. In sum, rate it 'A' for intrigue and 'D' for cohesion, and
Everything Perfect on the Wrong Day may provide a suitable soundtrack for playing video games with your buddies.