Ball of Flame Shoot Fire Confound and Enrage Us

Pittsburgh indie-rock native sons Ball of Flame Shoot Fire have released their second EP, titled Danny and Rob. The 5-song release, available at http://www.mediafire.com/?ozkne3n2jem, is material they created and recorded this summer while writing for their next full-length album. Danny and Rob is a follow-up to their 2007 EP Grumpy Little Bird and the 2008 LP Jokeland, which earned them comparisons to bands like Animal Collective and Man Man.

But it's definitely not the follow-up I was expecting. Jokeland and Grumpy Little Bird were remarkable masterpieces - hyper-literary, with complicated time signatures and song structures, with banging and yelping and horns and all kinds of magic. As first efforts, they established the band's ability to compose and arrange songs. Danny and Rob is something else entirely.

Danny and Rob appears to be BOFSF's half-baked attempt at using sampling and some new recording techniques. Although they succeed in making five distinct soundscapes, the album is unstructured, virtually lyricless, and a chore to listen to. The first track, "G20 Buzzcut," sounds a bit like Stomp, with bangs, pings, whirring all adding up to a samply, mashed-up mess. "The Joy of Dane Cooking" was created completely from Dane Cook samples. The last song, "Suntan," starts out with a great melody but never builds into anything, falling apart only a few minutes into the 9-minute track. Everything else is pretty unremarkable.

Whatever they are going for is simply overwhelming and inaccessible without BOFSF's typical endearing melodic strangeness to string the ideas together. Danny and Rob was definitely an experiment, but I am disappointed by their decision to make it a BOFSF release rather than some sort of side project. It's hard for bands to drastically change styles on different releases, and I am just not on board with this particular effort - it's an unfortunate addition to their discography. I hope that they get back to their old habits on the next release.