Haerts :: "Wings"

Like the parable of Icarus - a story with such aching implications five years ago and such troubling realities today - the notion of flying too high has always rooted itself in a delayed fatalism. It poses a reconsidered ambition. It reminds us of the thin air up there, the men who died on Everest and the people who dreamed too big or read The Great Gatsby with too literal an eye. Haerts, a band with slightly stronger than wax wings and a single of roughly the same name, "Wings", aim themselves directly into the stratosphere, or the end of Armageddon, or the career arc of Passion Pit - hell, you can pick the visual metaphor here - a sort of silly and precious desire to transcend themselves in a single moment. "Wings" becomes form meeting function, an act that is a soundtrack to itself and vice versa. With production duties handled by the indomitable St. Lucia, the guitars are warm and the hooks glide as if in zero gravity, no sense that this projectile of ambitions will prove problematic, or any notion that when up this high, you would ever have to come down.