If, like me, you were profoundly disappointed in the most recent effort from The Flaming Lips, I’ve got just the recipe for you. The record is called Puddle City Racing Lights (eMusic) and it’s the debut album from Windmill, aka Matthew Thomas Dillon.
It’s delicate and euphoric, deeply textured, with lyrics that sound surreal until you dig into them and realize it’s all about making the mundane sound extraordinary. And then there’s that voice, an ethereal falsetto that combines with the classic combination of chiming piano lines and drums that roll over you like thunder. Put simply, you could drop the best songs here into the middle of The Soft Bulletin and not skip a beat.
Plastic Pre-Flight Seats – Windmill
Tokyo Moon – Windmill
This is made clear right out of the gate with “Tokyo Moon” which sounds exactly like you’d expect from the name – a careening ride through the late night crowds of the Tokyo streets. The next few tracks bleed together a bit (probably the only meaningful weakness of the record is too many songs that I have difficulty distinguishing), but it’s all forgotten once you hit the triumphant peak.
“Plastic Pre-Flight Seats” and “Asthmatic” are the two tallest peaks of a mountain range, the only ones that rise above the misty clouds and stare at each other under a moon-lit sky. From here you almost feel you could reach up and touch a star, or leap into the sky and never touch the ground again.
“Plastic Pre-Flight Seats” in particular is one of the best songs I’ve heard this year: an anthem to end all anthems, with a chorus just begging to be shouted out: “jump out, jump in, jump out of your skin.”
Windmill won’t be for everyone. For one thing, if you can’t get over the voice, you probably won’t enjoy this band (though you still should check out the mostly instrumental, “Asthmatic”). And it will sound derivative to others. But in my mind there are plenty of worse things that mixing the very best of the Flaming Lips, Mercury Rev, the Polyphonic Spree, and Guided By Voices together and recording the results.
In my book, it’s probably one of the five best records I’ve heard all year.