Half-handed Cloud’s seventh album, "Flutterama," is a record of 18 jubilant indie-pop songs that investigate spiritual incompetence with lively, rhapsodic arrangements and radiant melodies that dissolve into sonic deterioration using herky-jerky tape manipulation and analog wow-and-flutter with an animated orchestra of home-recorded sound effects. This is an album of juxtapositions and contradictions, where joy and sorrow are underpinned by festive mourning, where balloons and tablecloths battle with trombones and pianos, and where the tape machine itself plays a vital role in the album’s drive, interrupting moments of ecstasy and revelation with varispeed pitch shifts and grainy decay. As with all things Half-handed Cloud, these songs are quick, bright, spastic, and fantastic. Whole libraries of sound and sense are compressed into mere seconds, with lyrical depth and wordplay conveying wit, wisdom, and existential anxiety that often seem at odds with the music’s joyful, child-like surfaces. At the center of this auditory journey lies the conscience and imagination of band-leader John Ringhofer, whose awe-and-wonder explorations of sound and unique spiritual conviction work in tandem to make sense of a world at odds with itself. If art is a battle, this album surrenders.
