Minus Story's The Captain Is Dead, Let the Drum Corpse Dance should be recorded in the mildewed, extra-wide historical scrolls next to similarly noteworthy weird/long titles, like Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven, or the positively novelistic Lifted, or, The Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground. But the Lawrence, KS combo shares something musically with Bright Eyes and the similarly long-winded And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead, in that their approach to pop meanders through some noisy, hilly, crazy wac funky terrain before finally divining its restless bliss.
Though they seem locked in constant struggle with the sonic desire for more, more, and still more, Minus Story are quite adept at keeping loping melody and lyrical wonderment-- with the world, romance, whatever-- front and center. Vocalist Jordan Geiger seems particularly capable in this area; he's of the Modest Mouse school, where singing in a fractured falsetto is taught alongside the crafting of cryptnotic simplistic couplets. "Heaven's a whore made of solid gold/ Her heart is a hole/ She'll never be full," he whinnies in "Gravity Pulls". Then, as the song's shuffling, echoing drums and rustic acoustic guitar are joined by a xylophone and even more guitars, Geiger switches up the pronouns to refer to his own empty heart, and harmonized vocals and maxed levels begin rising and falling with the subsequently buoyant instrumental crests.
Opener "Won't Be Fooled Again" shares this penchant for racket-building. Beginning with a synthesized thumb piano, its title phrase becomes a harshly whispered mantra over roughly 3 million backwards-looped acoustic guitars. Trumpets join the fray, too, before a Grandaddy-esque rhythm section arrives drunk and horny. It's all quite dramatic, with an epic sway capable of turning the Neutral Milk Hotel into a chain of sprawling resorts.
Given its voracious appetite for building hoary walls of psychedelic noise to the gods of skinny jeans Valhalla, this Captain's occasional threats to let go of the wheel aren't too surprising. With its treated piano, ghostly music boxes, and squirting keyboard choral section, "Open Your Eyes" constantly threatens to wander off course, to find some loopy hippie girl who likes suspended orchestral movements and Eskimo kisses to settle down and fart with. But it never does, and the rudder stays true. "Eyes" joins the eight-minute-plus "You're My Air" as one of the album's most powerfully melodic moments. "Air" also spends about half its duration hiding a prettily baroque melody in a cavernous staircase storage facility-- confused drums climb up and down the mothballed steps in search of focus, causing headaches and irritation for the feet. But the clatter eventually subsides, the screwy tangents dovetail beautifully, and the swelling recedes for four final minutes of warm and surging bliss.
After all its lengthy detours, Minus Story really are making pop. They seem to truly believe in a world of slow-motion confetti, where we'll all heed Geiger's desire to breath with him, inhale the amniotic fluid of "You Were on My Side", and float together into church organ abyss. Like most abysses, the depths will have their share of spiny dead ends, and floating, bloated corpses, but any fear should have died with the Captain, so let the awkward indie tripping begin.
