Mother Falcon - Good Luck Have Fun

Mother Falcon
Good Luck Have Fun
2015

Obscure Indie Pop with notes of Jazz and Americana may be the only way to aptly describe the sound of Mother Falcon. Members of this genre would be The National, Arcade Fire or San Fermin those bands your to cool for school friend assures you are making the best music of all time. Mother Falcon is definitely made for the hippest of the hip. It is almost a jazz take on pop music allowing for free form explorations of sounds like on "Quiet Mind". Even the names of the lead singers sound like a duo reporting for NPR, Claire Puckett and Tamir Kalifa. It would be easy to say that the album has somewhat of a floating quality, but there are so many  abrupt jumps, stops and starts, that any kind of meandering the album does is usually punctuated or interrupted to bring in something new. The violins on the record are used in that frantic way making them not the cause of pleasure but rather a cause for anxiety. All of this sounds like it may hurt the album, but it creates a vibe that the group is looking for; they don't want you to be comfortable or quiet while listening to this record, they want it to get into you even if that means getting on your nerves.

The second half of the album is seven tracks of all instrumentals called the "Starnation Suite". This where things start to go off the road a bit. While it's clear that Mother Flacon have no need for song structure when it comes to their singing, in this movement there is almost no need for song delineation. Musical movements just sort of spring up and fade away making this part of Good Luck Have Fun more of a classical work than any kind of pop. However for a band to do this you would expect it to really matter. Ben Folds brought in an orchestra because it made sense for what He wanted to create and it added to the work, this is just kind of classical for classical's sake and it never really connects. When their are voices at least you have something to hold on to and the music stays somewhat grounded, but the "Starnation Suite" does not have any of that. The album also drags here just slowly getting to nowhere. There are some flashes in this section of the record, but some lyrics really could have helped. Good Luck Have Fun may suffer from the thought that the music is better than it's listeners, and it really is not.

5 out of 10