Andrei Rikichi's Caged Birds Think Flying is a Sickness (a Bearsuit Records release) may sound claustrophobic and confined, trapped and rationalized, but to my ears it's bloody damn big, as big and as allegorical as a kaiju wonder. That's how I've chosen to hear it, to see it, and through my imagination, I've come to love the titanic tapestry it's helped me form.
Its subtitles are marked in a variety of ways, open to a variety of interpretations. Here then are my specialized impressions, monsterized and each numbered for one's convenience:
1) "Theme From the Butcher's Parade": The title implies a Leatherface slaughter, but the sound is pure, cutting kaiju: a creature breaking away from the sequestered earth, a wide-winged puffing lasered-smoke deity for the saga's start.
2) "They Don't See the Maelstrom": A merry, behemoth infiltration, thundering with each oversized thud, surrounded by naysayers, yes, but only until the mad, revealing march becomes too blaring to dismiss.
3) "At Home I Hammer Ceramic Golfing Dogs": A dandy title for sure, from which Rikichi's sounds shape a repetitive, workshed mania, but to a greater degree, the collective chords of harried helicopters, scanning a land that's been crushed and defiled.
4) "What Happened to Whitey Wallace?": I can only imagine he perished under the concrete, but for this colossal undertaking, there's a spy jive goin' on, like something out of King Kong Escapes or Terror of Mechagodzilla. Here we have many electrical entrapments, which make one wonder who's the real monster, manipulating man or rubber-suited foe?
5) "Bag, Lyrics, New Prescription": This one's short, so spectral that it's almost nonexistent (a proverbial calm before a storm), but the enormity of a threat can be packed in something so small.
6) "This": Old-school, sci-fi mortar, like saucers descending from the exotic Planet X or maybe even the mythic Mysteroid, where titans terrorize against their will via alien signals, but at their crusty, hungry heart, let's face it, terror is all that giants want.
7) "Player Name: The Syracuse Apostle": Now we get into a plan of action against the creature onslaught. A protagonist heads the fight. Through a jet squadron? A queue of tanks? Ah, better yet, the prophesy of a pretty harbinger!
8) "This is Where it Started": Flashback time, where speculation blankets the annihilating's causes and effects. Who let the giants in? But perhaps the better question is, who encouraged their ascent?
9) "They Hide in the Dark Forest": The title references an exterior expanse, but the forest is (to my mind's eye) enclosed and computerized, beeping away with another Rikichi spy jive, searching for answers, demanding replies.
10) "Who's Driving the Handcart?": The computerization hits its shameless summit. Sounds of data spill with great insight, but also a lack of reason. Rikichi's notes beg for an end of attack, but the search for closure spawns defeat.
11) "The Butcher Band (I'm In)": A Raids Again sequel of sorts, where titans clash, with a personalized pledge (and cheer) to either cruel side. Its chords slid hard and play far harder.
12) "Caged Birds Think Flying is a Sickness": The eponymous, philosophical theme of all those who disbelieve, only then to become devotees of strange and amazing phenomena. Rikichi's melody indicates a something-is-out-there confirmation, serious and frivolous at the same time. (If the truth be known, sheer, juxtaposing genius, if ever there was!)
13) "Death of a Postmaster": The most morose of this epic set, an anthem for an everyman who's been smooshed and stamped into doing what's right, his sacred sacrifice bellowing beyond a watery grave.
14) "This is Where It Ends": The eclipsing, end-credits scroll to an album that redefines one's faith in the anti-mundane. The final chords declare that the land (the world) has been forever reclaimed. No matter how much mere mortals scoff, the human condition no longer resonates. The old rule now towers as the lumbering new.
Though Rikichi's flair for the melodramatic may work one way for me, it'll no doubt summon a different view for you, perhaps something Kurosawa-esque or geisha-gal/pleasure-house oriented, then again maybe something entirely else. His orchestrations have that unique ability to tap personalized angles, dreams, hopes and sorrows, either among a subtle strand or the long-way-home extreme. In any case and under any classification, this Caged Birds experiment is mammoth.
https://bearsuitrecords.bandcamp.com/album/caged-birds-think-flying-is-a-sickness
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