Reviews for 'Planes Fly Overhead.'

This label is great, they send me free sweets with review items. I love that! Put out more records so that I can get more sweets! It also helps that this label is releasing good stuff, man! I wish more obscure indie rock labels that put out good stuff would send things for review. Plus sweets. Forest Giants do fuzzy, poppy indie rock and they do it really well, opening with "Planes Fly Overhead", burying the vocals behind a wall of guitar and keyboard that just fuzzzzzes away like it was exiled from the 1980s. Its almost effortless, and it can't really be that complicated to pen a tune that has so little change in structure throughout, but sometimes that's all I need. This song really reminds me of something that I can't quite put my finger on, I guess its got some shoegaze elements going on but its fused with the pop so sweetly. To tie things up they give us "Gone Away", which is miserable and downbeat and triggers the thought of Galaxie 500 to me. Love it. Too bad about the lumpen second track on here, "Pick Up The Pieces" which didn't float my boat at all, but the other two tracks are really impressive and bode well for a great future for this band. LP please!

Andy Malcolm for Collective-Zine.

I really rather like this. A big old bag of noisiness with fuzzy guitars and big drums making a right racket. A bit like Clearlake or Jesus and Mary Chain. 'Pick up the Pieces' is absolutely fab with its zonked out vocals and insane riffs. Admittedly final track 'Gone Away' is a bit of a change of tack (and a bit of a disappointment to be honest) but with two belters on one CD already, you can forgive Forest Giants for that.

Shane Blanchard for Tasty Fanzine.

Forest Giants feature various ex-members of Bristol bands and as such it's little surprise to find that 'Planes Fly Overhead' sounds like the Blue Aeroplanes in a hurry, with a tune that's an odd hybrid of Wire and Stereolab. 'Pick Up The Pieces' converts Mark E Smith into a human wah-wah pedal, while he fronts early Mary Chain. This download only three track single on Cherryade Music is well worth picking up if you fancy something a little different.

Russell Barker for Russell's Reviews.

Assorted ex-Blue Aeroplanes launch with superb radio-friendly melancholic pop. If Terry Hall fronted Kaiser Chiefs, it might be this warped. 8/10

John Earls for The Void [Teletext].

Forest Giants include in their ranks former members of indie legends the Blue Aeroplanes and Beatnik Filmstars so it shouldn't come as any surprise to learn that this record sounds like it came straight out of the late 1980s which, naturally, is a very good thing indeed. There's is a superior blend of fuzzy guitar, only as many chords as is absolutely necessary, a super-pop disco beat and the overall sound of a band who were listening outside the door of Stereolab's early recording sessions. Couple that with a storming climax that actually does sound like many planes are flying overhead in a wall of feedback-drenched sound, and you have one delectable musical treat. 10/10

RB for Culture Deluxe.

Loving this like a puppy loves the ankle of your new jeans, sounds like something from The Who's "Quadrophenia" that's been interfered with by Marc Almond, there's an idea, eh? Here's another, check this beauty out.

Unpeeled.

I think it's important to keep singles alive in any way possible, much as I wish this was a 7", or indeed anything tangible, but in the brave new world which this 'zine likes to inhabit, I know that labels without promo budgets can't afford singles as loss-leaders. It's not like the majors, who spit out the usual 2xCD single, one with remixes by current press darlings, one with lame previously-unreleased-for-a-reason extra track, plus a limited numbered 7" etc etc yawn, and a few weeks later emblazon "featuring the hit single..." on the inevitably underwhelming LP.

Anyway. One of the best 7"s of this century was, of course, the same combo's "Postcards" (let us leave aside here the technicalities of whether it ever actually got a proper release). That tune demonstrated how the humble single can be more than just an album taster: how the space of three or four minutes can be the ideal vehicle for snatched reminiscence. "…We can watch the planes / fly over Catbrane Hill / coming into land / no, really, it's a thrill..."

More than two years later, the aeroplanes are back in the Filton sky. "Planes Fly Overhead" is a three minute runway of sound: a huge hulking fuzz of reverb, brilliantine keyboards and faintly hazy guitars, anchored only by some staccato Fall riffs and a pacy throb of a bassline, which culminates in an extended fade, hewn from a mazy tagliatelle of frazzled chords and vocal "aahs". Don't get the wrong idea though - this is not the indolent blissed-outness of the likes of Air Formation, where the vocal becomes merely another harmony, another eddy in a wash of wispy psychedelia. Instead, "PFO" is like a marginally more boho younger brother to "Postcards", still identifiably an indie-pop song rather than a head-in-the-clouds shoegaze anthem, mainly thanks to the matter-of-fact timbre of Tim's voice. "Tell me once again what constitutes failure", he asks, possibly mindful of a world in which getting a street team to rustle you up a few thousand downloads might catapult you into the mid-reaches of the top 40 and (ephemeral) success in the eyes of your fickle coterie, whereas simply making great records to fervent but limited acclaim, as frankly many bands are doing on a semi-regular basis, is regarded as something akin to eking out the bins round the back of Sainsbury's.

A word for one of the B sides, too: "Gone Away" is one of those songs where the Giants jettison the noise and veer instead into what can only be described as Galaxie 500 territory. (Not enough bands do this, which is remarkable when you consider the perfect simplicity of "Today", say). Anyway, it's a nicely plain, rolling ballad, reeking of delicate sadness, which plateaus gently from time to time around the chorus rhythm. You find yourself tumbling back awhile, to the moment when you first got the Beatnik Filmstars' "Maharishi" taped for you, and saw it translate the draggy dolefulness of the Galaxies to a Bristol postcode for the first time. In today's fevered pop world you rarely encounter this kind of measured restraint (sigh) - all the young groups now, well, yes, they act like peasants with free milk, but also, they are scared to bare themselves. Here the lyric is someone in awe of their subject: but it's down to earth, no frills, no histrionics - sensitive, without being melodramatic. That is all too rare in guitar bands these days. It's also, incidentally, one of the reasons why the Wedding Present were one of the best groups ever and not, as many would still have it, one of the worst.

Useless Romantic for In Love With These Times, In Spite of These Times.