With help from Someday River’s Greyson Charnock on production, lead single ‘Florida’s Warm’ picks up this mantle and marches forwards. With morose vocals teetering on despondency, the song tells of far-away dreaming of Floridian warmth when stuck in a New York winter, the isolated bone-chill providing a neat allegory for the themes of grief and loss. With more than a hint of fatalism, the song isn’t hopeful so much as hopeful of hope, the narrator holding on to the image of a brighter day, homesick and half-tortured by the slim possibility of the chance the sun might rise once more, bringing a thaw that might allow some sensation to return to frost-bitten limbs.

“So I just close my eyes, pretend I’m home,
Florida’s warm tonight, it’s all I know
Sorry for how I went and cut you out
Sorry for how I am holding out

When I close my eyes, I see you there
Florida’s warm tonight, it’s what I want
Sorry for how I went and fucked you up
Sorry for how I am not enough”

The album has no official release date or title as of yet, though Day Joy promises to “leak” it out “single by single” over the next few months, so be sure to keep an eye on Soundcloud/Bandcamp for that.

Photograph by Travis Reed

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I wrote a brief piece about Josh Scott’s Aero Flynn a few weeks back after reading some words by Field Report’s Chris Porterfield. The letter/essay (which you can read here) painted Scott as a supremely talented musician and songwriter and spoke of the self-titled Aero Flynn album as “quite seriously a life-or-death record” which should be heard as “a spit in the fucking face of the symptoms of disease, like rot and destruction and apathy and cynicism”. Given how much I respect Porterfield’s work, this sort of language got me excited.

The album begins with ‘Plates2’, a restrained track of gentle synths and countrified electric guitars, not a million miles away from Porterfield’s Field Report, while ‘Twist’, which brings to mind Radiohead, solidifies Scott’s subdued vocal delivery. ‘Dk/Pi’ opens with electronics backed by an ambient hum, the spacey bleeps and bloops of Spencer Krug’s Moonface layered on top of something older and less clear. Shambling drums kick in to create a sound akin to The War on Drugs, Scott’s dreamy vocals drifting through the nebulous arrangement with a delicacy that suggests impermanence, as if the sonic environment threatens to consume him. As the song progresses the instrumentation disintegrates, distorting into reverby fuzz and then a confused white noise before blinking out to leave a large cosmic swelling. This is an electrical anxiety, a malfunction in which communication is lost and isolation complete, Scott a lone astronaut surrounded by planetary screams and an airless dark.

The beginning of ‘Crisp’ is gentler but not without threat, an acoustic strum peppered with glitches which suggest the calm is a façade, a veil under which reside wrung hands and sharp edges. “Can I feel you?” Scott inquires over and over, one of many pleas for connection on the album, leaving the listener to wonder if he’s speaking to an individual or humankind as a whole. Or perhaps it’s just to himself in the mirror. Again the track unravels, the introduction of more prominent synths morphing in the final minutes into another hostile environment, a tumultuous sea or some geomagnetic storm that swallows Scott and drags him further from whatever he is trying to find.

Aero Flynn is at once urgent and suspended, trapped between fight and flight in anxiety’s masterful double bind. “I’m so afraid of everybody else” he sings on ‘Tree’, a stuttering electro-pop song, while even ‘Floating’, a soaring track that’s all blue skies and wide open vistas, is permeated with a sense of dislocation, as if the freedom is not his to own. ‘Maker’ sounds like a Broken Social Scene track where lonely sadness is presented as matter-of-fact, at least until the end where Scott utters a single word (a word I can’t quite make out – Home? Whole?) in a way which sounds like the genuine emotion breaking through, a yelp of helplessness or cry for mercy held back or choked out after the first syllable.

‘Brand New’ feels like a crescendo of sorts, a move away from the futuristic electronics that bring to mind space’s dark void in favour of something more organic, a swelling Precambrian atmosphere where conditions are harsh and life is scarce but maybe not for long. Closer ‘Moonbeams’, a piano led track with elements of The National’s slower work, provides no such epiphany. Slow and nervous and sorrowful, the last track again casts Scott as the outlying astronaut looking back at Earth, the final waves of instrumentation mimicking the beautiful, heart-breaking joy of realising you are but the tiniest of specks subject to the largest of forces beyond your control.

This is not an album in which the emotional arc is self-contained and easily mappable. Instead the record feels like a part of a wider narrative, Scott’s story, the illness and suffering and terror that Porterfield alludes to in his piece. The redemption does not begin with an epiphany on track seven and end with clear-eyed certainty. The redemption is the very fact that Scott is creating words and sounds, that he is letting others know where he is and how he is and why he is. The album is the flare of hope hanging in the night sky, burning bright and incandescent.

Aero Flynn is out now on Ooh La La Records (and Dine Alone Records in Canada).

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Aquarena blends the folk rock of bands like My Morning Jacket and Band of Horses, the nostalgic dreaminess of Beach House and the psychedelic tendencies of The War on Drugs. It’s a winning combination and one that could bring a great degree of success, especially as the band are readying their debut full-length record in time for the summer (release is scheduled for the 13th of May).

Until then, you can get Aquarena on limited edition 10″ vinyl via Bandcamp.

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