Metallic Falcons - "Airships"

Somewhere there’s a woman who carries a hand-held cassette recorder wherever she goes. She records ideas for songs as they come to her, fragments of melody with her voice. When I first met her, I thought this was an affectation and I didn’t like it; I wished that she’d stop. Later, I realized that she was more unselfconscious than I’d given her credit for, just her unembarrassed embarrassing self. And then I was glad for the tapes, for they document the seeds of a brilliant body of work - a million songs wide and as many good ideas deep. She called herself The Fresh Young Breath, maybe still does. Though, given that she never performed, and barely ever shared her work, a name was unnecessary.

There’s something of the disconcerting otherwoldliness of The Fresh Young Breath in the work of Metallic Falcons, something of the trudge and swamp and loneliness. “Airships” is isolation made musically manifest. “Come with me,” the singer beckons, “where rainbows die.” And she invites us to other liminal places, too, and paints them with the distorted, falling-apart notes of an electric guitar. How have we come to hear this, I wonder? This impossible summons. It calls to mind a girl singing tantalizing thoughts into a recording machine, the fruit of which will never reach our ears.

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