.jpg "TALENT SHOWS: Craven + Co. go high.")
Lost on Liftoff’s self-titled debut EP has no business being released in the dead of winter. The bright heat it radiates only makes us pine for the warmth of summer rays all the more. Oh, the sentiments are dark, sure, wonderful retrospective melancholy mixed with plenty of jilted bitterness, but they’re delivered with such pop intensity you can veritably warm your hands by them.
I don’t care if the first song does bid a “Goodbye Summertime.”
It’s no surprise that former Goud’s Thumb and 6gig frontman Walt Craven professes a simple focus for his third foray into the Portland music scene and beyond. “The song is king,” he says. “The songs are the spotlight and not any one particular person or instrument.”
That’s a lot easier to say when you are surrounded by the talent Craven is in Lost on Liftoff. He counts himself lucky Nick Lambert (Chaos Twin, guitars and vocals), drummer Shane Kinney (Broken Clown), and bassist Dan known as Shifty (Chaos Twin) called him up and asked him to join a project they’d been playing around with for a year or so.
“I’ve known Nick for a long time and I knew that Nick was a great songwriter, so I was pretty excited,” says Craven. “I was floored by the songs that they were working on and I called Nick back immediately and said, ‘I’m in.’"
Good thing for us he did. The four-song tease they release January 31 is loaded with huge singalongs and compelling rock and roll. That’s right, rock and roll. Can we be excused if we like to risk hearing damage in the car on the way to work? No, you can’t have a conversation over this. Shut up and nod your head.
How about a chorus like this: “We’re naked and wasted, and we’re waiting/ Waiting for the moment to take us, from frustration into patience/ Forward till the end of the line.” At the end of “Naked and Wasted,” which finishes the disc, this echoes a frenzied 16 minutes of music that strips you down and shoots you up.
The songs are full of progressive songs that love every bit of the verse-chorus-verse construction, but don’t think just one type of verse, or one type of chorus, is quite enough for one song.
So, in the four-minute “Goodbye Summertime,” we’ve got a standard opening verse — containing the lovely sentiment, “Take me apart by bolt and screw/ Keep on poking holes in my spacesuit” — that leads into a melodic pre-chorus. Then we get chorus part one: “Goodbye summertime, another year to wonder why/ I feel left behind, another way to say goodbye.” This is your traditional yelled chorus, the everyone-stands-up singalong. Oh, wait, but then we get chorus, part two: “I’m doing fine without you,” delivered in traditional ballad chorus fashion four times all melancholy and subdued, emoted with increasing force.
