Ian McGlynn :: "Falling Toward Heaven"

Ian McGlynn's relentlessly poppy "Falling Toward Heaven" forces the listener between two surrealist choices. The very title suggests an inverted world where gravity now pulls upward, shot in reverse through the standard Calvinist lens, that we are pulled ever closer toward the divine and not the damned. The other option leaves Newtonian physics intact, suggesting that we are above Nirvana and gravity pulls us ever closer down towards it. It is an attractive series of images, all layered against a silky smooth chorus and a waltzy rhythm that inspires gauzy images of an idealized adolescence that certainly never existed. McGlynn's pop is sweet enough to hurt your teeth, saccharine enough to rip through fillings and stick to the roof your mouth, but something about the initial imagery, about all of us falling upwards, all of us grainy images of suspended Astronauts catching floating grapes in our mouths as we wave to the schoolchildren on the other end of the distant connection, feels exactly right.

Listen :: Ian McGlynn - "Falling Toward Heaven"