The Shards Of Glass Will Cut The Sky

Bruiser & Bicycle “Aerial Shipyards”

It isn’t hard to reverse engineer Bruiser & Bicycle’s aesthetics, at least not if you were paying attention to indie rock in the mid to late 2000s. This sounds like the work of musicians who were steeped in very specific records at a formative age – The Shins, Girls, Modest Mouse, The Flaming Lips, and most especially Animal Collective. I try not to overemphasize “this sounds like that” here as it can be lazy and unfair to artists, but there’s just no getting around the degree to which the vocals in most of their songs sound like Avey Tare. It’s in the contours of the melodies, it’s in the specificity of the cadence, it’s in the timbre of the voice. If I heard this without context I probably would have just thought it was a new Avey Tare band, albeit one considerably more normal than his other bands.

But this is no complaint. I have long admired Avey Tare’s gift for melody and it’s nice to see that become an influential aspect of Animal Collective rather than the surface elements of their work. Also, the scramble of influences – however identifiable – is what makes Bruiser & Bicycle stand out as something fun, distinctive, and little wild. “Aerial Shipyards” is full of playful twists and turns, a song with the structure of an epic but played scrappy enough that it comes off as more like a low-key whimsical lark. The lyrics are wordy but very vivid in laying out what I interpret as a metaphor about how all of life is graceful and fascinating but doomed to eventually crash one way or another.

Buy it from Bandcamp.