If Flotation Toy Warning is out to lull listeners with sheer melodic excess, perhaps it's working a little too well. Over the course of the band's elegant avant-pop debut, it subjugates effect to ambition, inflating concise pop sound-bites to epic proportions (10 songs in a daunting 72 minutes). Sitting at the digi-pastoral nexus of Scott Walker's overstated vocals, the Flaming Lips' neon popscapes, Brian Eno's ambient experiments, and Neutral Milk Hotel's found-sound dalliance, FTW engages in much repetition that seems unnecessary-- many of these ideas could have been winningly discharged in half the time. Instead, they intricately bloat and dawdle, and you might feel "over" a song before it breathes its admittedly gorgeous last.
In its first minute alone, "Happy 13" gathers up sloshing water samples, wheezy electronics evoking everything from keyboards to bagpipes, crashing drums, acoustic strumming, and a request to "please leave all shiny objects behind." Gradually adding spectral harmonies and twinkling detuned piano to this mind-cramming dream travelogue, it shuffles through dizzying permutations. "Popstar Researching Oblivion" introduces some common FTW motifs: Chuffing, vaguely martial percussion; wavering organ gasps; ripe, elegiac brass; spangled sheets of reverb; and angelic choruses intoning fat, fallow syllables. The multitude of instrumental parts is so similarly colored and oft-repeated that it sometimes blurs into obscurity, but the band can also be glorious in this state of resonant disarticulation. When Paul Carter hunkers down to tell stories, it's less interesting.
Musical standouts "Donald Pleasance" and "Losing Carolina; For Drusky" broaden the sonic palette further, with trad-indie guitar arpeggios contorting though starry expanses of limpid strings and icy chimelets. Lyrically, the former revolves around Carter's steadfast, suitably despondent eulogy at the funeral of "our love." It's a great concept, but as on many of the tracks, the band's sonic accouterments prove more moving than the vague libretto. In the latter, a nightingale song flits around the fairly incomprehensible tale of Drusky, who wanted "God to return his youth" while "resurrecting his mother and his pet pigeon."
The most memorable track might also be the shortest and simplest, "Happiness Is on the Outside", which finds Carter casting distant "hellos" into an amorphous blizzard of melodic interference. Beating within the chilly precipitation of his a.m.-wire salutation is Carter's most pressing query (even if he sometimes asks it indirectly): "Can you tell me why you left me here all on my own?" At song's end he promises, almost threatens, to eventually open the page of his diary that rejoices in solitude, and relates "how [he] took your throne as the meanest bastard in the all Albuquerque." But hey, why's the Brit in Albuquerque, and who left him there? Often, the intangibles of his downer vocal timbre denote felt emotion, but Carter would also do well to let loose some colorfully site-specific sentiments, giving his syllables a chance to catch up with the magical Victorian tapestries looping around them.
