Liquid Mike : Hell Is an Airport
Are Liquid Mike music’s equivalent of Primemutton? Hear me out. Both are viral sensations, the former project started by a Michigan-based postman whose lulls were filled by crafting tunes that sent indie Twitter into meltdown, the latter a connoisseur of fine food and drink that decided to vlog about it. They churn out material to feed their fandoms consistently. Mike Maple’s ear for a perfect hook rivals Mutton’s taste for a perfect Guinness. And considering online slop today, people take notice of authenticity which absolutely coats this power pop group and the professional bridge player. Go figure.
Talent and enjoyment remain a winning combination, basically. Liquid Mike—consisting of Maple, Monica Nelson, Zack Alworden, Cody Maracek and Dave Daignault—have a knack for making the sort of catchy guitar-driven music that would take people like me a lot of academic reading to acquire, and in droves. Hell Is An Airport is their sixth full-length in four years, not counting extra EPs, that further masters the art of brevity and studio-sound fullness that’s defined them since S/T and Paul Bunyan’s Slingshot; very much following the blueprint of Guided By Voices’ Mag Earwhig! era onwards (a huge influence on Maple) and with less bubblegum than, say, Fountains of Wayne.
With such a killer framework, it could be easy for them to deliver more of the same. I’d sure be happy with that: short-and-sweet rippers, with no absence of vibrancy befitting the live setting. Even better, though, is how Hell Is An Airport presents that very idea at first, then peels it away across its duration. Intro “Instantly Wasted” is the titular brother to last year’s outstanding “Drinking and Driving,” a lilt that duly gets straight into every-line-is-a-hook territory. From “Lit From the Wrong End” the fluid song transitions stack up and it’s a crazy thrill. That sequence into “Crop Circles” and “Double Dutch” makes it seem like the troupe could write a feature-length film from only power chords, and I’m convinced they could. The jumpy strums at the end of “Crop Circles” are employed differently, yet just as bumpingly, on later tune “Liam Gallagher” while vocal harmonies crank the solid instrumentation up a gear on “Claws”.
The mood shift following the opening mini-suite on “AT&T” is also where new ideas bubble to the surface, and they work very well indeed. Here, the songwriter’s relatable opinion of airports as purgatory is shown through humor-lashed loneliness (“Wake up the bugs in the drywall / Once you witness your little ant farm grow, I guess you’re not alone”), that humdrum matched by Nelson’s Napoleon Dynamite-style synths. The additional single “Groucho Marx” adds to that sardonicism too: “You really don’t wanna know what you ask in the mirror / You’re gonna curl up and die? Ok, so am I.” This understated lyrical heft throughout feels effectively pressed against the sheer joy that screams from the guitars; they’re a big chorus guitar band at heart, throwing little details in short bursts. Daignault has shredding solos on “Meteor Hammer” and the single-coil sounding “Grand Am,” while “99” has an unbelievably beefy intro riff segueing into feedback then Crazy Taxi skate punk (befitting the year of its namesake, perhaps). The snug math-rock interlude among those elements has to be heard to be believed, as does the cute trumpet on “Selling Swords” or the DJ scratches on “AT&T” that sound like Incubus. Each part fits far more in place than what reads on paper.
The only downside is the record so heavily comprising blink-and-you’ll-miss-it stuff. As an absolute hoot from the get-go, it’s easy to go on autopilot with the consistent singalong head-bobbing. Then again, that only emphasizes the group’s baffling ability to do that seemingly without much effort. There’s no better remedy for when you’re stuck inhaling perfume fumes at Duty Free; as Prime Mutton would say, Hell Is An Airport is “an absolute creamer.”
Label: Self-released
Year: 2025
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