LP Spotlight: Flight Facilities – Down To Earth

With a spotless reputation for churning out some of the best electronic singles we’ve heard in the past few years, Sydney duo Hugo Gruzman and James Lyell finally have lift off with their debut full length. Avoiding the temptation to assemble a premature greatest hits album, they’ve taken a stab at a cohesive piece of work, picking four of their eight previously released singles. Down To Earth features a host of talented fellow Australian musicians while crisscrossing with quick flights from genre to genre, decade to decade. While at times the layovers feel contrived between tracks that are not all instant classics, Hugo and James have managed to produce an enjoyable journey that serves Flight Facilities well enough as a premier LP.

Track by Track

Intro & Two Bodies – “Just a few safety precautions before we head off. We ask that you move about the cabin as much as possible; be sure to loosen those belts; and remember, all our flights are fitted with smoke detectors, so do try not to get caught.” We lift off with an unabashedly cheesy intercom marimba and string ensemble as the mellow chords of Two Bodies come into play. This one lit up online in September with an avalanche of remixes (check out our favorite from HNNY). Wasn’t expecting such a calm song like this as the album opener, but Emma Louise’s vocals are too much of an earworm to really get picky.

Sunshine – You’ve got to love Reggie Watts and you’ve got to love his vocals on Sunshine. Aside from the vox, the guitars are the feature here, from a funky rhythm envelope filter in the back to the soulful wah-wah solo in the fore at 2:40. One of the best new, memorable tracks on the album.

Walking Bliss – Featuring 1950s philosopher Gerald Heard’s reflections on LSD: “Empathy. These things flowing underneath; we’re parts of a single continent. It meets underneath the water, and with that goes such delight; the sober certainty of waking bliss”. Walking Bliss serves as colorful and smooth bridge between Sunshine and Stand Still, though it feels like just that — an interlude meant to bridge two complete songs.

Stand Still – Picking up the tempo for the fastest track on the album, you’ll recognize that iconic whistle immediately. Stand Still showed up to the party last winter and turned heads with an 80s pop flavor. The sharp synth in the outro rides as a nice counter to fellow Aussie Micky Green’s delicate vocals.

Apollo – Another segue — think of it as a quick transfer flight from the fire-in-your-shoes groove of Stand Still to the somber introspection of Clair de Lune. The fadeout transition feels fast and forced, at least as a bridge for these two. Though I don’t think Apollo has enough substance to stand out on it’s own, the silence before the storm at 2:50 will give you a smile.

Clair de Lune – Hugo and James brought something very new and different to the table with Clair back in 2012. It’s inspired by the Debussy we’ve all heard before, and in an interview with inthemix, Facilities shared: “We wanted it to be one of those album tracks that people discover it themselves and it becomes a very personal lullaby to listen to at home, at night, before you go to bed. But it sort of superseded that, somehow . . . We make a whole lot of three and four minute vocal tracks and people are like ‘yeah this is fun’ and then you make one self-indulgent, eight minute almost entirely instrumental and that’s the one that hits the charts. Which just goes to show you can’t ever predict anything, you can’t.” Within the context of Down To Earth, it’s a welcome and needed splash of color — a year in the making, it lends diversity and stands as one of the strongest, most mature tracks on the record.

Hold Me Down – I swear to god this intro is from Top Gun. Can’t help but love the reverberated claps, love the retro synth chimes, love the muted guitar, love the tom fills . . . yeah, love the song. It has character. It’s dangerously, dangerously close to tacky (many would say it crosses the line) — but it has character.

Heart Attack – Lots of great percussion and textures here as we take a detour into techno. Owl Eyes’ voice is candy, the contrast between the frantic staccato synths and the gliding legato pads is a great touch.

Merimbula – The sirens and engines of Brooklyn streets melt into an extremely unique, clever, and interesting mix. The ping-pong eighth pattern of the marimba is smartly matched with glitched vocal samples while syncopated woodblocks click along. The symphony bursting through after a grooving bass-centered breakdown through me for a loop the first time — Merimbula is a really fun listen.

Why Do You Feel – Bishop Nehru injects Flight Facilities with a healthy dose of New York jazz and hip-hop. Hugo says: “We really like 90s hip-hop, and were just thinking, how cool would it be to have our own hip-hop track?” Why Do You Feel has real flow; easily one of my album favorites, I’m going to come back to this one a lot in the near future.

Down To Earth – Honestly, not strong enough to serve as a title track. When the piece of music that’s meant to stand as the focal point of an artist’s statement, the thesis of the essay, centers itself around an incessant vocal sample embellished with space-age bleeps and bloops that don’t seem to have a clear destination in mind . . . it has a way of draining the color and magic from the real standouts of the album. Don’t get me wrong, Down To Earth is a nice piece with its own merits, just not a jewel in the crown.

Crave You (Reprise) – Really not a fan of Kylie Minogue’s take. Her vocals come across as over-dramatic and vain, and the embellishments actually take away from the nuance of Giselle’s voice on the original that follows. Crave You could, and should, easily stand on its own — it has for four years. This reprise adds nothing new artistically, if anything it gives the feeling of being added to the album like a child’s toy in a box of cereal.

Crave You – The song that started our obsessive love affair with Flight Facilities so long ago. A piece of work that is ‘dripping in gold’ itself, there’s honestly not much to say — a fitting end to the journey as we touch down on the tarmac.

At the end of the day, the choice of title track speaks for the album as a whole. It feels like a genuine attempt to weave a cohesive piece of work together from a few fantastic but discrete threads, but at times detracts from the real impact of the songs we’ve heard before. It’s hard to criticize a group that has had a near perfect record with singles in the age of singles. Each release since Crave You has been an absolute gem, but it’s that reputation that makes forming a full-length album such a daunting task. The age-old practice of sprinkling a collection of stock filler with a few popular singles for an album is a trap that Flight Facilities just manages to sidestep. But while the album’s transitions can feel a little unnatural at times, and we’re given a few less-than-memorable numbers, the presence of strong new tracks like Sunshine and Why Do You Feel are reassuring indicators that Flight Facilities is well capable of producing a larger work of art. Down To Earth is a commendable debut effort for a group I see continuing to grow a lot in the coming years.

Check out Flight Facilities here, and get the album here.