Planes Mistaken For Stars

Up In Them Guts (2004)

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Sometimes inspiration will come on a dark rainy night as you're walking home from watching a movie at a friends house, jump up from the bushes and kick you in the stomach, it is in that instant of terror - your pituitary gland sends a signal to your brain – and you have to make a choice, fight or flight? Do you run or stand your ground? If you've happened to be listening to your headphones with PMFS spinning - you begin to levitate, a light saber appears in your hand, laser beams shoot from your eyes and a Bahamut screams from the heavens to blast the enemy with ancient and powerful magic. The inspiration becomes part of you, no longer a phantom lurking in the bushes – it has been assimilated. Without such a nerdy revalatory metaphor of course!

Now what does one do with that inspiration? Such vague and ethereal metaphors are for space cadets and poets, or coffee house wordsmiths that like to listen to themselves talk (and Magik the Gathering Alumni). That inspiration, that music that comes from Planes Mistaken For Stars gets in your soul, mingles with your hopes and aspirations and becomes the driving force behind your work day, bus ride, trip to target to purchase toilet paper – whatever. Garedmikeymattchuck make rock and roll palpable, they make it that much more edgy. A serrated blade drug slowly across an exposed mid drift. They are making Rock and Roll dangerous again.

A cello opens the track "Spring Divorce" and the pummeling drums of Bonzo incarnate, Mikey Ricketts (AKA Mongo) is like listening to a tornado in 5.1 digital surround. "Bastards" follows two tracks later and doesn't stop the rock, it intensifies it, if that is even possible in this rock and roll riot. Up In the Them Guts was recorded at the Mogis brother's Presto Studio's in Lincoln NB, and the untold talent of the entire group was finally fully realized. AJ Mogis was instrumental in contributing to Cursive's, The Ugly Organ and now with Up In Them Guts, he is destined to become the most sought after production man in the indie rock world. Its an anolog grit Mogis adds, and its brilliant so long as Planes never ends up sounding like some overproduced version of 'gasp' Funeral for a Friend.

Each song on Up in Them Guts is more impressive than the next. I'm breathless, it's on the second (third, fourth) spin right now and I can't even indulge anymore metaphors. Well, maybe one more - their music is blood, drink it in small doses.