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.

Suburban Moms Love Ball of Flame Shoot Fire

The music of Pittsburgh indie rock darlings Ball of Flame Shoot Fire has proven to be immensely popular with a strange demographic - suburban moms. Ball of Flame Shoot Fire, composed of Mt. Lebanon High School graduates, released their first EP, Grumpy Little Bird, in 2007, and released their first full-length album Jokeland in late 2008. Often compared to Man Man, Beirut, and other nationally acclaimed indie rock darlings, Ball of Flame Shoot Fire combines epic, time-signature changing, hyper-instrumented with a choir of falsetto voices. They shout, they clap, they bang on stuff, they frantically sing nonsense about religion and love and people named Bertie. And all of this endears them to the women who raised them and others like them. Says Wilson Cook-Winston, the band's pianist, "As the sons of suburban moms, it makes sense that we understand the issues they face, which comes out in our music, especially the live shows." Suburban moms are a great demographic for the band to attract - with their large disposable income and an adorable lack of knowledge about music piracy, they make ideal fans. The band has started to look into ways to accomodate this portion of their rapidly growing fanbase. Says saxaphonist Henry Peters, "We'll probably have to play live at more reasonable times - maybe lunchtime concerts they can go while the kids are at school. And a whole new line of apparel - aprons, New Balance cross-trainers, and control top pantyhose."

Even non-suburban non-moms are invited to check out BOFSF at www.myspace.com/bofsf