Review Summary: While showing too much restraint might have resulted in an entirely forgettable album, Bryan Scary and the Shredding Tears's dramatic impulsiveness instead created a thoroughly enjoyable album that veers from the absurd to the boisterous.
Bryan Scary and the Shredding Tears are the poster children for self-indulgence. That fact becomes apparent as soon as their second studio album,
Flight of the Knife, begins. Over a dark and rolling piano, a distorted voice (imagine Darth Vader meets Chewbacca) slowly declares the album's title over the sound of an airplane taking flight. A chorus of voices begins to build, wordlessly, harmonically howling over an erratic guitar and a staccato piano. Within its first minute, the album threatens to fall over the precipice of cacophony, but suddenly the chaos fades away into a nicely driven, funky beat. A piano pounds along with the kick of a bass drum, and Scary begins to softly sing over that. This overly dramatic style is a Scary staple, and it could easily make any album feel bloated and tedious. Instead, surprisingly, this time it works. It adds an over-the-top, operatic vibe to the catchiness and funk of
Flight of the Knife.
After all, the album is a concept album, and it tells a vague enough story about a young boy who aspires to fly the greatest airship of all time, the titular Knife. Most of the story is told loosely, with the tracks linked lyrically by characters and vivid nonsensical imagery that wouldn't feel out of place in a Lewis Carroll novel. The protagonist, early on, sets off to a "city made of fire-trees," which he reaches in track 5, "The Fire-Tree Bird." That song ends with the speedy, singsong repetition of the refrain, "The fire-tree bird is a merry old bird, is a merry old bird, is he." The next track is a much slower outing in which Scary softly croons, "Hello, hello, it's me, it's me, I'm the sky-ship thunder-man." The album is the perfect combination of nursery rhyme and jazzy funk, and while the story itself might not make any sense at all (an alien from Venus is the center of the album's second track, though its importance in the story isn't clear), it's the perfect amount of surreal silliness.
While the majority of the album is pretty moderately paced, there's a manic energy pervading throughout the album. A few songs, before segueing into a softer, jazzier mode, start off with a frenzied piano-guitar duet that will almost certainly get your heart rate up (case in point: "Imitation of the Sky"); the opposite is true for others such as "The Fire-Tree Bird," which starts slow before suddenly shifting into overdrive for a breakneck chorus. Even "The Zero Light," one of the album's calmest songs, ends with an unexpectedly boisterous guitar solo. Scary's own piano work throughout the album also shows some talent, especially when the tempo slows down. "Heaven On a Bird" begins with what might just be the prettiest moment of the album: a delicate piano intro that's both sweeping and precise.
Scary's influences on the album are obvious, from the glam-rock stylings of
Queen and
David Bowie to the earlier, folk-rockier tones of
Bob Dylan and
The Zombies.
Flight of the Knife is a great big melting pot of the music that Scary likes. He doesn't hesitate to embrace the strange, and though he flirts with the obnoxious (the Bee Gees-esque harmonizing in "Son of Stab" is thankfully not protracted), he manages to bring
Flight of the Knife down to earth with some absurd lyricism and solid instrumentation.
While showing too much restraint might have resulted in an entirely forgettable album, Bryan Scary and the Shredding Tears's dramatic impulsiveness instead created a thoroughly enjoyable album that veers from the absurd to the boisterous, but never ceases to be entertaining.
