"When you cease to walk/ Your bones turn to chalk," twentysomething David Karsten Daniels moans in long-drawn, halting breaths, sounding like an old man ineffectively raging against the dying of the light. The weary ache of "Wheelchairs" sets the stage for a concept album of sorts. Fear of Flying, Daniels' fifth solo (but only second widely available) LP is a collection of songs inspired by his grandparents' physical decline, songs that flip thoughtfully through some complex, if well-thumbed, existential issues: mortality, God, and the struggle for faith.
A former member of North Carolina's Bu_Hanan musical collective, Daniels recently uprooted to Seattle, but brackish Appalachian groundwater still seeps from his rustic compositions. And his left-coast migration aside, Daniels again garnered studio support from the tarheel colleagues who backed him on 2007's Sharp Teeth. A backwoods orchestra of strings, keys, and, unexpectedly, saxophone populates the otherwise bare branches of slow-surging folk-pop song "Martha Ann", and a female vocalist's warm and vigorous harmonies extend Daniels' limited range. "Oh, Heaven Isn't Real" is a blasphemous rebuttal from the pews, a handclapped and howled hootenanny arguing that "Hell is a lie, hell is a lie/ The preacher's up there trying to get you to make nice." It's the only cut here that exudes unfettered joy, and its catchy church-ditching chorus is the album's biggest take-away.
Not to say that some of Daniels' more austere efforts aren't compelling. An anxiously pounded single-chord piano figure boldly underlines "Falling Down"'s black-humored account of a catastrophic car accident. "In My Child Mind You Were a Lion", slowly piles layers of organ glow and cymbal sizzle on a foundation of ruminative fingerpicking for the kind of long-coming catharsis familiar to Jason Molina fans. Its musical drama is well-earned: "Lion"'s lyrics probe the devastating-- and universal-- experience of witnessing seemingly all-powerful parents shrink to husks before your eyes.
Molina, however, isn't the solo-guy-with-guitar with whom most people will compare Daniels. No, the elephant in this particular room is a scraggly-bearded Kentuckian with royal affectations. Daniels' kinship of timbre and phrasing (not to mention, some overlapping lyrical concerns) with Will Oldham forces a contest in which Daniels places second. Too often, Fear of Flying forces its profundity, as in the life-cycle lesson, "Every Time a Baby is Born" or the Lord's Prayer recital of "Evensong", which, as the final track, strands the album on an ambivalent, unsatisfying plateau. No one expects a modest singer-songwriter to solve humanity's basic quandaries in 11 songs, but Daniels could learn something from Oldham: In the midst of death we are in life and might as well live, love, lust, even sin, while we wait for the Reaper's cart to come around and collect us.
