A plane-spotting tune that captures a fluctuating melancholy
Fluff & Gravy
YouTube
I like songs about plane-spotting greater than better-known hits about really being within the air. Props to “Leaving on a Jet Airplane” for elevating heartache and “Eight Miles Excessive” for reaching peak altitude, however I am going to all the time choose a heart-worn tune and a few lyrics about dreaming, wishing and by no means fairly getting off the bottom. A plane-spotting tune can flip joyful, however extra typically it lingers in that all-too-human area of tenuous hope: not fairly letting go of somebody leaving, virtually managing to take a subsequent step your self.
Portland, Ore.-based singer-songwriter Kassi Valazza captures a fluctuating melancholy completely on “Watching Planes Go By,” a standout observe from her enrapturing second album, out now on the West Coast’s best little label, Fluff & Gravy. Kassi Valazza Is aware of Nothing sees the Arizona-born artist buying and selling in her twang, equivocally, for a hazy psychedelia extremely evocative of late-Sixties English folks music and its Laurel Canyon counterparts, particularly early Joni Mitchell. “Watching Planes” invokes Mitchell’s “Michael From Mountains” with a primary character who’s eager for vistas past his window. Within the tune, Valazza’s Michael is, like Mitchell’s, a free spirit — however he is been grounded by a damaged foot, a secular calamity that evokes a reverie about accepting limits and sustaining perspective. The magnificent swirl of sound and lyrical poeticism that Valazza and cosmic Americana band TK & the Holy Know-Nothings construct round this glimpse of a man trying skyward turns the tune transcendent. To cite one other heady child who loves aerial metaphors, if flying on the bottom is unsuitable, Valazza’s gonna make it proper.
