Aeroplane Pageant
Bay Shore, New York, United States | INDIE
Music
Press
Baeble Music adds Aeroplane Pageant's - Brief Confessions Of A Young Bear video to their collection
- Baeble Music
AOL Spinner presented a full CD listening party for our LP3 Float Above The Yard.
"This New York band teeters between affectionate power pop and well crafted indie for their most recent release." - AOL Spinner
This video is as weird and surreal as it could get. By combining catchy electro-pop with random 16mm footage, you get this Aeroplane Pageant music video. Some of the footage shows a man by the ocean, other footage reveals strange dudes in the woods playing in bear costumes. Either way, there is little to understand here, other than that the weirdest shit makes good art. - Consequence of Sound
Aeroplane Pageant, 'Help Me Shoot This Apple Off My Head' -- Video of the Day - AOL Spinner
Playful, "ear-friendly" (or "pop" if you wish) experimentation...something reminiscent of The Beatles...but these guys are way more out there in terms of song structure and overall complexity of the arrangements. This is pop with a non-pop structure, so basically a rather unique musical paradox. - The Deli
“Inspired by the likes of the Velvet Underground, Guided by Voices and the Flaming Lips, Float Above the Yard is equal parts orchestral, cinematic and pensive. In ushering out their collective mission statement, the album plays out with a whimsical, Lennon-inspired swerve that’s almost too good to be true.” - AbsolutePunk.net
“Inspired by the likes of the Velvet Underground, Guided by Voices and the Flaming Lips, Float Above the Yard is equal parts orchestral, cinematic and pensive. In ushering out their collective mission statement, the album plays out with a whimsical, Lennon-inspired swerve that’s almost too good to be true.” - AbsolutePunk.net
The latest disc from Aeroplane Pageant, "Wave to the Moon," is one of the best indie-rock albums of the year so far. Somehow, the group combines the hopped-up pop of, say, Modest Mouse with the brooding atmospherics of Red House Painters. Singer Brian Kelly, blessed with a fine, slightly quavering voice, sounds like a folk poet and a shaggy rocker at the same time, crooning his way through soft verses and belting out noisy choruses. Standout tracks include the lovely "All the Days"; the quirky, piano-based "Oh You Know"; and the 71-second elegy "Rosalind." - Rafer Guzman
Newsday interview with singer'songwriter Brian Kelly.
http://www.newsday.com/entertainment/music/ny-etlisound1212944131jul08,0,4050696.column - Newsday.com
In some ways, Aeroplane Pageant can be compared to The Beatles circa “The White Album” with its eccentric storytelling and more experimental approach in “Even the Kids Don’t Believe Me.” The band takes more risks in its songwriting, honing in on its unique sound. The charging acoustic guitar, sweeping guitar, cascading bass lines and solid drumming are all there, but this time around, it’s much harder to pin precise influences to the music. - The Deli Magazine
“It’s a fucking weird album! I like it! I have to listen some more, because it has that Fiery Furnaces thing about it: DEEP, REQUIRES EFFORT. But I was very surprised in good ways at the bizarre arrangements and the way the melodies don’t follow and stuff. My kind of thing, in fact. Consider me a fan, and put me on the mailing list, and all that sort of thing.”
-Rick Moody
- Rick Moody
Stars Still Pretty named MP3 of the Day for August 2nd, 2009.
http://www.spinner.com/2009/08/02/aeroplane-pageant-stars-still-pretty-free-mp3-of-the-day/ - AOL Spinner
Magnet Magazine featured Aeroplane Pageant as their video of the day for July 1st, 2009.
http://www.magnetmagazine.com/2009/07/01/film-at-11-aeroplane-pageant/ - Magnet Magazine
On their sophomore full-length Even the Kids Don't Believe Me, the band once again forges ahead with their remarkably crafted dream pop, only this time they push the creative edges a little further. Even the Kids Dont Believe Me possesses a Beatles playfulness that is harnessed by vocalist Brian Kelly's highly memorable vocals. He croons in a voice that quavers and warbles, often times sounding wrecked and damaged and other times sounding inspired and sprite. There's a magnetism to his voice that keeps one wanting more every time he opens his mouth. - Absolutepunk.net
And yet they never sound imitative. Rather, it's in their pastiche of earlier sounds that they strike upon their own -- dreamy, indie-pop songs guarded by the caffeinated fence of post-punk revivalism and resting beneath bittersweet clouds of early shoegazer rock. - prefixmag
It's just the type of combination that finds a way into your sub-conscious. You will find yourself mindlessly singing the lyrics or humming the tune long after the album has finished playing...With Wave to the Moon, Aeroplane Pageant continues to demonstrate they are in this for the long haul, laying the foundation for what promises to be a long career. - Blogcritics.org
Vibrant and lovely from start to finish, Wave to the Moon is the ultimately mesmerizing first full-length from New York collective Aeroplane Pageant. The hazy beauty of the album’s ten tracks approximates, at times, a more indie-fied, less disconsolate version of The Cure (at other times the band recalls contemporaries Belle and Sebastian or The Shins, though overall the group’s music has a unique feel); each song is imbued with sublime guitars, a sense of rhythmic momentum and Brian Kelly’s enigmatic vocals. - Popmatters.com
Discography
"Float Above the Yard" (Stormy Ice, 2011)
"Even the Kids Don't Believe Me" (Stormy Ice, 2009)
"Wave to the Moon" (Self Release, 2007)
Photos
Bio
Aeroplane Pageant is not a pop band all the time.
But after fourteen months in a studio that sits directly under the rattle of the Wantagh train station and following fifteen years of brutal friendship, Aeroplane Pageant now introduces its latest effort: FLOAT ABOVE THE YARD (LP3).
And so in this yard, or better yet on this genre-less album, you might float above an impressionistic landscape dappled with some wolves, some apples, a crowd that gathers and then cheers on a horse, a family being pushed off a house, a few birds and flowers, some black flowers, a lovely garden, some teeth , a hundred or more ghosts, and always a TV, always a billboard, a big moon, a few cities, some cake thats been left on the floor, and of course the compulsory confessing young bear, a bit of blood, some of it fake, a rope hanging by a tree
as these songs are often dark and quirky and intimate narratives where a blend of real and imaginary desperate characters, beg to love, to be loved, and to make sense of things, as time, it burns us thin, and loss, death, and confusion undo youthful expectations. And this idea of struggle and disillusionment is never more obvious than midway through the album on, We Were Once a Boy, when singer/songwriter Brian Kelly proclaims over cut-up horns, primordial drums, and panicky guitars, Now were hanging by a rope on a tree in our front yardand this kind of heaven isnt what wed said it be.
So how does one recover in the face of disappointment? How to begin again? To see again with plain eyes, to be again this time and not pretend Im aliveand we didnt dream enough in this house! shouts the band in harmony during the minimalist and electronic, Brief Confessions of a Young Bear, a buoyant track held together by jittery percussion and a zigzagging bass line. And this we sentiment of starting again together, of understanding, overcoming, and rising above the bleaker moments echoes throughout here, as the songs and music urge us to observe and celebrate, and to listen to each other, and to consider hope and the human imagination first, even as we grow and sheer apart, Part of you has drifted/Like a voice that breaks with distance/ And I hate that Ill admit it/So I came here to listen/ I came here for you, we hear on the cinematic orchestral number Desperate Characters. And then the hushed playful exit, when light breaks for a moment, a sense of release or acceptance on the albums closing track, Hello Radio; its a blurry-ballad that fights and breathes through shards of noise, as children laugh in the backdrop, when Kelly gently asks of someone or everyone, I want you to be good to yourself, good to you and everyone else.
and yet this album, according to Kelly, is a hyperrealistic paean to the suburbswhere the events within could happen in anyones backyard, in repeating landscapes, houses stacked on top of each other, amid the drone and anxiety of shopping mall America, amid the comforts of television and self-imposed alienationall deliberately infused with sharp juxtapositions of image and sound, at once insular and celebratory, bright and dark, abstract and material, noisy and melodic, repetitious and formless, organic and electronic.
This brace of songs is most often motivated by the sensibilities of the early dark folk idiom, the earthy confusion of psych-pop, the exploratory provocations of bands like the Velvet Underground, Guided by Voices, and the Flaming Lips. Its the sheer excitation of the imagination. Its trying to make things happen. And this time we wanted to combine literary-minded content with some of the latest experimental production techniques. Our idea was if we can hear or visualize the sound in our heads then lets figure out a way to build it, says Brian Kelly.
The making of this album is an over-dramatic love-story. Its a story suffered by a collection of best friends, all of whom have known each other since the earliest days of high schoolas they now plug away at their perfunctory day-jobs as writing instructors, journalists, mailmen, parks department employees and tech-managers, and unemployed US citizens developed in a concerted fanaticism with sound, with creating sounds, with constructing ideas and tying songs together, We really wanted to blur the content of these songs so itd be difficult to distinguish between whats real and whats fakewe wanted to disrupt the illusion or the expectation of what traditionally makes up the song, offers bassist Tim Watson. Drummer Mike DeLorenzo elaborates on this idea, by stating, The ideas wed established from the get-go were something wed all felt closely mirrored our own little realitiesconstantly in flux and discontinuous, almost schizophrenic, and never quite real, perhaps sometimes too real.
And so in comes 2-time Grammy Winning Mixer Bassy Bob Brockman to materialize Aeroplane Pageants little realities. Through a mutual contact at Technicolor Stud
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