The Flat Five Cloak Dark, Eccentric Humor Around Deceptively Innocent Melodies 

The Flat Five | Another World | (Pravda Records/Augiedisc Records)
4 out of 5 stars

What you hear isn’t necessarily what you get with The Flat Five. There’s plenty of shadowy weirdness going on beneath the surface of their sunshiny, fizzy, jazz/pop, but you have to listen closely to find and appreciate it.  

The Chicago vocal-centric group seldom plays live, and this is only their second release. That’s due to their busy schedules, working with high profile indie acts like Neko Case, The Decemberists, NRBQ, Andrew Bird and others. Additionally their material is written solely by songwriter Chris Ligon, older brother of the band’s Scott Ligon, and it takes him a while to craft these subversive slices of easy listening.

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Imagine The Manhattan Transfer singing Steely Dan, and you have a sense of the concept behind the discreet darkness of Another World.  Without listening closely, “The Great State of Texas” sounds like a waltz time children’s nursery rhyme with the lyrics “Had my last birthday party, it don’t mean a thing” above a lonesome harmonica. Instead, the singer is a prisoner headed for the electric chair in the titular state. On “This’ll Be the Day,” Ligon wraps Don McLean’s “American Pie”’s catchphrase around a chirpy melody where the protagonist flips her car over, killing her while singing the song’s title. There’s suicide (“I Don’t Even Care,” “World Missed Out”), marital affairs (“Butterflies Don’t Bite”) and even child pornography (“Look at the Birdy”), subjects you wouldn’t find on a death metal album, all sung by cheery, frothy sounding voices and played with a similar sense of naïve purity. Of course that’s the idea, and while it might seem like a one-note joke, these performances are so affable, sweet and effervescent that they feel innocent and uplifting. That is until you listen closely.

It’s so fluffy, sweet and innocuous, you might play it for preschoolers who won’t realize what they’re singing. Envision wrapping a rotting onion in cotton candy, and you’ve got the idea.

Do you need a warped sense of humor to love this? Perhaps, but those whose personalities skew to the shadier side will find the unlikely approach of Another World to be a much needed jolt of flippancy in a current atmosphere that could surely use 35 minutes of exceptionally witty, somewhat nefarious, music.