Mother Falcon began while its members, including founder Nick Gregg, were in high school. A sense of undertaking a nerdy, adventurous lark was inherent, because the players were initially just experimenting with original material on orchestral instruments like cello and violin.
Between those after-school practices and Good Luck Have Fun lie hundreds of shows, thousands of miles, college attendance, college graduation and two other albums. The lark has become serious—a kind of day job—and that alteration in turn alters the adventure of the music.
The basics haven’t changed: viola, vibraphone, bouzouki, saxophone and trumpet are still alongside the aforementioned cello and violin. There is also the continued presence of more conventional rock and pop instruments like electric guitars and basses, although they are still not allowed much spotlight space.
However, the basics have pushed further toward two ends.
On the front end of Good Luck Have Fun are the collective’s most accessible songs yet, with the vocals a step or two in front of the rest of the music and therefore a step or three subtler than the placement of vocals in nearly every other variety of modern pop.
On the back end is the “Starnation Suite,” a half-dozen wordless pieces composed for an upcoming documentary film about competitive gaming; soundtrack functionality is indicated mainly by titles like “eSports” rather than by the pieces themselves.
The back end’s instrumentals are cumulatively powerful, while the front end’s voices are simply not powerful enough often enough. Against the string-section harmonies that brood through “BoxeR,” for one example, Claire Puckett’s pale singing on “Kid” sounds paler.
If each half didn’t blend so well internally, the whole might feel less starkly like two different journeys abruptly and arbitrarily halted. If each half converged better with the other, the total adventure would be even more fascinating.
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