The opening chord of For If You Cannot Fly is not just a power chord: it’s the battle cry of my 1990s. Let me back up a moment. The measurement of a band should be their battle cry. Whether it’s political, personal, or metaphysical, the first chord, the first song, the first ideas should be the thesis. What makes an album a spiritual experience? The fact that an experience is shared? Vague, yet introspective lyrics? I’ve always thought it was the opening chord, the first intriguing notes that bring the listener in. And maybe no better first lines, personally, exist than: The last time that I spoke to you, I said some pretty mean things. It didn’t feel good, but I felt better.
Amongst the albums in my collection that I’ve listened to hundreds of times, so many of them have become noise. I can do anything while they are on: write, read, sleep, etc. They are worn out grooves, markedly unsurprising songs, background pulse. Small Factory commands my attention no matter what is happening or who is around. For If You Cannot Fly has been with me through cardigans, military school, collegiate strangeness, growing into adulthood, funerals, sunny days, boredom, clutching sanity, breakups, relationships, NC, NYC, VA, NC again and now onward. On the right day, the days when I am not whoring for attention– the days where no one can really hear me and won’t ask me about the particulars– this is one of my top five albums.
I don’t want to share this album unless you are going to love it. I can’t listen to people badmouth something so personal. It would be you saying that riding with my sister to high school was boring, my drunken walks home through Astoria boring, my nights alone trying to write boring. It would be calling me boring. Albums frequently transcend the listener-creator relationship, but others are beholden to a different mindstate altogether. For If You Cannot Fly isn’t just an album I absolutely love: it’s an album I want to recreate. It’s an album I hold inwardly important, and it’s one I have trouble describing or talking about. Describing the conversational lyrics, the three-singer lineup, the two halves (as if it were written for vinyl/cassette, side A is completely different from side B), the way it starts as a sloppy punk album, descends into noisy indie and settles into alt-folk-alternative, it is all too strange for me. The album runs a gamut of emotional spheres and it works.
Ed. note: I’ve split the review into two “sides” as an homage.
SIDE ONE:
The jangly riff at the beginning of the third song, “Hi Howard, I’m Back” is a bit jarring at first. The distorted guitars of the first two rockers belie an expectation to keep the angry, insolent tone going, but the angst continues with this wonderful story of a young man trying to prove his worth to an older set. Hi Howard, I’m back/all the other kids quit/ I’ve told you this countless times before/ countless times before/ count all the times before/ Now/ I’m gonna drink until I fall down. The only way to know this song is to experience it: to be the young outlier amongst a group of cooler folks and realize they aren’t, in actuality, cool. Maybe that’s not the literal meaning, but I gotta go with what I know.
Descending further, “Sensible” is one of the best breakup songs ever written. Instead of using a series of memories, inside jokes or straightforward heart-on-sleeve lines, Small Factory sing of drifting apart. If there are lines more indicative of drifting apart than, “It’s getting harder to be harder to be sensible./ It’s getting harder to keep it straight./ All your friends wound up bitter and cynical./ You just say that’s great,” send them to me. The brilliant use of female backup vocals only make the coldness of the song more inviting, more tenderly misguided. I learned how to be bitter with this song as the soundtrack, then relearned once I realized I didn’t know how. “It’s getting harder to make heaven hear us now./ You say they never did./ Well, that’s just great./ You say, that’s just great.” And onward goes the fight.
Hardest to describe amongst all the songs is “Everyone’s Happy for the First Time In Weeks.” Distorted vocal effects over tape loops and super-repetitive drums make a void of sound. There is no chorus, just a lateral movement of ineffectual lyrics. Here’s a sample portion: “This wonderful Sunday fills the moment: Patience waits and hopeless eyes./ Your faith won’t let you compromise/ Careless words from drunken mouths/ Your cigarette just burned my hand/ A bitter pill that seems so easy/ Everyone’s happy for the first time in weeks.” From there, the song explodes into a small, but viable, wall of guitars that reaches a quick climax before a coda of tape-loop fadeouts. Afterward, the listener feels dazed but undaunted. The song is one of disaffected glory; an invitation to the mindset of the disaffected, in fact.
“Versus Tape” is a gleeful rocker exalting the folly of youth and another fantastic example of what was so right about “indy rock,” a shout out to the band Versus. Hungry, tired, exalted, pissed: the range of emotions that come with the guarded and lonely are all there. And no other band, I think, could sum up the objective correlative Small Factory created than Versus. In fact, like a well-placed book sitting on a table in a movie, this mention of Versus creates a milieu for those in the know. Oh, this band knows Versus? They must be cool. Then again, for anyone who doesn’t know Versus’ catalog, the shout-out is as empty as the character in the song. Knowing what makes you an outcast is precisely what continues your being an outcast. “Versus Tape” is the exactitude of knowing who you are, loathing and loving it, all with the inner-banter that creates you.
Wait, though, I haven’t really finished telling you about the first two songs. “Last Time That We Talked” is more than a myopic rocker, it’s a still-shot of release. It’s a defined and refined catharsis. “No, no wait/ I’m not done./ I’m having too much fun./It’s not over for me,/ in fact it’s just begun.” It’s an argument, apology and unreasonable explanation in one song. On an album that is so hard to pigeonhole and impossible to recreate, this is a song that penetrates the listener with both song and story. “Last Time…” is the allowance the listener needs to understand the dynamic of a top-five album. The band is both furious and understanding– capable of understanding and harsh, scientific coldness. This is the basis of culpability and the ability to seize and transcend vulnerable moments.
“Expiration Date” is another short, angry blast of realism. Explanatory while shortsighted, “Expiration Date” is a concentrated version of its predecessor. A near-disorienting four-chord assault likens the song to a punk rock ultimatum without the normal political or cultural questions that arise of said genre. The song and story again intertwine in an undertaking easy defined: the listener is lead into a specific emotional outburst rather than a vague mindset. This specificity is exactly what makes the opening to this album so special and memorable. These are moments captured, pictures of emotions. Instead of the mock-poetic or pretentious, For If You Cannot Fly’s Side A is track after track of cues. And they lead to an opposite, though similarly provoking, Side B.
Side B and conclusion coming soon.
Great stuff. I’ve had that album in heavy rotation for the past 16 years.
Unbelievable. I just imported hundreds of songs off an old hard drive into iTunes 10 and spent last night searching for the cover images that weren’t automatically detected. I decided that your image of this Small Factory cover art had the best color depth and the fewest jpeg artifacts. Something made me bookmark the review for later reading. Until I looked for the link to the Side B review, I didn’t realize that you’d posted this article only yesterday — scant hours before my image search! Thanks for reintroducing me to this gem — I hadn’t listened to it all the way through in years. (And thanks to Google for speedy indexing!) I eagerly await the second half of the review.
Matt and Chet, thanks. I’m quite certain the second part of the review should be up this week. Glad to talk to people who appreciate this record– it’s absolutely brilliant.
thank you chester.