After about 20 years fronting the alt-country band Frog Holler, singer and songwriter Darren Schlappich has gone off on a side project to record some songs that don’t quite fit that band’s mold. The new band is called Ataloft, after an imaginary pop band Schlappich, his brother and friends dreamed up as kids in suburban West Wyomssing, Pennsylvania. In addition to Schlappich, Ataloft is Michael Lavdanski, who was there when Darren started Frog Holler as a bluegrass trio in the 1990s, and another longtime friend, Bruce Siekmann. Darren sings and plays guitar and on this collection of 12 songs the other two play everything else; they’re joined by three other players when they perform live. The debut album is simply titled Ataloft.
The songs aren’t radically different from what appeared on Frog Holler’s most recent release, 2009’s Believe It Or Not, but the production and settings of the songs are. It’s apparent from the first moment of the first song, “The End Is Nearer Than We Know.” Schlappich sings “Long ago, when we were kids / we played ball in Whiskey Ditch,” backed by plucked banjo and strummed guitar. The production has a high-reverb pop feel to it, and Schlappich’s vocals are doubled and more, emphasizing both the warm depth of his soothing baritone and its nasal-tenor overtones. The semi-ominous sound of a bowed double bass, which I think is synthesized, emphasizes the lyric’s theme of hope and acceptance in the face of nostalgia and mortality, as he launches into the refrain: “Face your fears and let them go, the end is nearer than we know…”
The record has lots of pop touches that hearken back to classic rock and roll and country. Siekmann and Lavdanski contribute “shoo-wop, shoo-wop” backing vocals to the jaunty “Old Jones.” The sunny and lilting “Warning Signs” has similar backing vocals but more in a Simon and Garfunkel vein than “Old Jones” ’s doo-wop. The songs have little touches of sound samples that suggest a front porch or a cozy parlor – creaking rocking chairs at the beginning of “Worried Mind Blues” and a needle dropping onto a vinyl record’s groove, with its attendant hisses and pops, at the beginning of “The End Is Nearer Than We Know.”
If I have any criticism of this home-spun and comforting folk-pop record it’s the proliferation of mid-tempo and slower songs. It’s broken up occasionally by the Johnny Cash shuffle of “The Way It Feels,” and by the lovely waltz-time of “Take A Bow.” And the arrangements are indeed varied, if subtly so. There’s a bit of percussion that sounds like marimbas on the final track “The Parking Meter,” chiming electric guitar and soaring B-3 organ on the slow rocker “Silverfish & Marigolds,” and a great twanging baritone guitar on “Old Jones.” I can tell the band is a bit livelier in person. Check out this video of a performance of “Old Jones,” and you can also download that track and “The End Is Nearer Than We Know,” at the Ataloft Bandcamp site.
ZoBird, 2014
